


Halo: Spartan Legacy

by Legume_Shadow



Series: Halo: Section Zero Archives [3]
Category: Halo
Genre: Alternate Universe, Author Likes to Write Weird Stuff, Author does not like Karen Traviss's Halo books, Gen, long story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-01
Updated: 2010-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 06:11:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 73,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legume_Shadow/pseuds/Legume_Shadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to Halo: Section Zero.  When the portal to the Onyx Shield World closed, the SPARTAN Blue Team along with Dr. Halsey and SPCO Mendez thought that they were trapped, most likely forever.  Instead, what they discover is not just a possible weapon that could turn the tide of the Human-Covenant War, but turn the tide in a war that had fallen dormant and forgotten after the extinction of the Forerunners themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Era: Halo Trilogy, Halo ODST, Halo: Fall of Reach (first edition), Halo: First Strike, Halo: Ghosts of Onyx universe. Does not incorporate most of Halo: Reach (except for tech) or anything in the Halo 4 and Forerunner expansion mythos.
> 
> First Publishing: March 2010. All copyrights apply to the appropriate parties and no profit is being made from this fanwork.

**Chapter 1**

1700 hours, November 6, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

“Six days in this hole and not a hide or hair of any fucking glowing eyeballs or that natty floating flashlight,” Carver, a Marine who had inexplicably ended up stationed on this God-forgotten world, muttered as he continued to sight down his scope.

“I wonder what’s going on up there,” Jeri, Carver’s spotter said as she shifted a bit on the ground and looked away for a moment to consult her datapad. “I hope the others in the zone got to safety.”

“If they did, then maybe the fucking shiny ball would have dropped them here. How the hell did we end up in this backwater planet, Jeri?”

“You’re asking me?” his teammate snorted in derisive laughter, “You’re the one who drunkenly punched that spook.”

“He deserved it,” he protested, “That fucking bastard was deserved every punch I gave him.”

“So say we all,” she replied, shaking her head a bit, though she knew that he would not be able to see it. She shifted a bit and placed the binoculars back up and peered through them, scanning the small grassy hill in the distance. “At least zed-six-seven doesn’t have a bar.”

“It has nothing, Jeri…absolutely nothing…I mean, come on, how is a man supposed to relieve all that stress?! Keeping an eye on those spooks in those white lab coats all day can drive anyone insane.”

“Its supposed to be rehab for you, Carver…not a brothel…” Jeri said, sighing. “Covenant forces on the verge of wiping humanity out and yet you still think like a Neanderthal.”

“Well, they could have sent us to the fucking front lines and I could have relieved my stress by shooting a few in their balls, if they have any…why the hell do they want a compliment of Marines keeping an eye on spooks? There’s nothing here, for crying out loud!”

“Except for those glowing eyeballs who tried to fry us,” Jeri pointed out.

“Yeah, those fucking bastards…” he said and fell silent for a few long moments. “Hey…its been pretty quiet now…if we’re stuck in here for another few weeks, maybe you should take the opportunity to woo, seduce…whatever you women folk do to get men into your bed…the el-tee?”

“My sex life is none of your concern, Carver,” Jeri curtly said. “And for the record, no…I don’t care if the others think he’s the only shit on this rock…no. There’s something about him, and about the see-oh…they seem like a family still mourning for the loss of a sister.”

“Come on, Jeri…we’ve been here for what, over a year and you still think that?”

“Yeah…unlike you who’s head is constantly in the gutter, I keep my ears open. Rumor has it that both of them had been involved in a lot of top secret ops out there before something happened and they got posted here. I heard from Katerina that she has seen them leave this rock once in a while, but they always come back.”

“But Katerina’s a spook…you can’t trust them…they’re scientists…determined to examine every last microscopic cell out of you,” he said. “Can’t trust them at all.”

“Not even if they’re the ones trying to figure out where the hell we are on this rock? Can’t even trust Doctor Yelchin? I’ve seen you chat with her more than I’ve seen you say two words to the other scientists.”

“Some how, that ice queen always manages to find me and question me, Jeri. Not my fault at all…it’s like she has some kind of tracker on me…I don’t even know why she insists on talking to me all the time. If she weren’t such a cold-hearted bitch, I’d fuck her long and hard…but no, she gives me the creeps.”

“Uh huh,” she replied, dubious. “Knowing you—wait, contacts over the hill at around one-o-clock.”

Carver swung his rifle to the location that his spotter provided and sure enough, there was indeed some fuzzy movement on the grass that was most certainly not caused by the wind in this place. He heard the radio crackle a bit as Jeri reported in their situation. Zooming to the highest setting possible on his sniper rifle, he thought he saw the fuzzed glint of something metal, but with the grass on the far side in the way, he couldn’t completely tell. Something was out there, but whatever it was, it was hiding quite well.

“Hey, I think that might be a sniper rifle…” Jeri whispered to him after a few moments. “Flash the aye-ef-ef broadcast, will you?”

“And give away our position?! Are you fucking insane?” he fiercely whispered back.

“Do it, Carver. If indeed the light bulb has brought more, we need to let them know we’re friendly.”

“And if they’re not allies, then what? We’re fucking dead!”

“Just trust me, Carver,” she hissed back.

After a few moments of deep contemplation, he said, “Fuck this. I’ll haunt you for the rest of your sorry next life if we’re ‘naded to death.” He pulled his finger off the trigger and rapidly tapped a series of long and short taps on the button near the trigger to get the signal light going. When he finished the message, he waited for a few long tense moments, imagining the sound of a grenade whooshing to the place where he and his spotter were, giving them a death pelted by fragments of who-knew-what.

“Holy fucking shit,” he breathed as both he and Jeri saw the surprising message flash back at them. “Better tell the camp that we have incoming…” he croaked out.

“Yeah…” Jeri absently said as she pulled out her radio and contacted their base.

 

* * *

 

 _Others have survived_ , Fred thought, as he pushed back from the hill he had been lying on, and slid the rest of the way down. Linda remained where she was, carefully watching through her sniper rifle. Others, not Spartans, but Marines… He didn’t know who had been stationed at Zone 67, but judging from its secrecy and the fact that the SPARTAN-IIIs knew little of the restricted area, it was most likely staffed with ONI personnel. But why would ONI also staff Marines there? _Were_ they expecting enemy forces?

There was one more burning question in his mind as he jogged back to the small temporary camp that had been set up under a small cluster of trees. How did the others get to this place?

He remembered when they had split to destroy the Sentinel Production Factory – Dr. Halsey had mentioned that she was having trouble accessing the teleportation device while transporting Team Saber, Tom, and Lucy back to the main area. Could it have been other survivors trying to teleport themselves to the Slipspace chamber? The doorway had been open for a long amount of time; perhaps that was how others survived.

Fred shook his head a bit; he couldn’t afford to speculate and keyed TEAMCOM, setting his external speakers on too so that Chief Mendez and Dr. Halsey could hear him. “There are others that survived. Unknown how they got there, but it seems enough of them survived to set up a base of operations about two klicks northward from here.”

They all shifted uneasily, though Chief Mendez had the most peculiar expression on his face. Far from the Chief’s usual stoic look, he had a deep frown on. Did the Chief know something about Zone 67? As much as Fred wanted to press the Chief for details, he didn’t and said, “Ash, take your team and wide-arc half-a-klick around. Kelly, go with them. Keep your friend-foe tag active. We don’t know what perimeter they’ve established. We’ll leave the pods here for now. Chief, Dr. Halsey, stay at Linda’s position until the all clear is given. Tom, Lucy, you’re with me. We’re taking the direct route.”

Green acknowledgement lights flashed across his HUD and they all silently split off. He took point while Tom and Lucy took the rear, creating as best as they could, a protective range of motion and fire around Dr. Halsey and the Chief. If Chief Mendez had armor on, then he wouldn’t have to worry, but the Chief didn’t. The three of them dropped off the Chief and Dr. Halsey near Linda and silently ran up and over the hill.

It wasn’t paranoia that had caused Fred to separate the team into smaller units; it was the fact that he didn’t like that there had been no evidence of the earth being trampled on since they had landed in the Shield World. The earth they had trod on in the past two days since arriving here was perfectly uniform and pristine, and drawing from that conclusion, it was possible that the other survivors must’ve found another way in. That meant that there was a possible way out.

Keeping his friend-foe tag active, the three of them cautiously continued to make their way up another small hill and onto a plateau, passing the two Marines who had initially made contact via Morse-code by light. Far from even turning to stare at the three tall Spartans passing them, for Marines, Fred found them to be incredibly disciplined; they didn’t even take their eyes off the horizon. That worried him a bit.

“They have an overwatch stationed about half-klick west from here, near the stream. Didn’t even see the pair until they flashed us their aye-ef-ef tags, sir. They’re really good,” Kelly whispered over TEAMCOM.

“I see their camp, about a klick from where we are,” Fred replied, keeping the slight unease he felt from his voice. “It’s backed against the shear cliff. Go back for the pods.” That unease was quickly erased as he keyed the six-tone all-clear signal, seeing two familiar faces he had never expected to see again among the small group that had gathered just on the edge of the camp.

Coincidence or just luck, Fred could never tell, but in the past days, it seemed that old former teammates kept showing up. Teammates that neither, he, nor Kelly, or Linda had seen in over thirteen years. It was good to know that they had survived the war thus far, and for non-Spartans, they had proved themselves in the four missions they had been working together on that Blue Team had adopted them into their group. One had perished in the final of the four missions, but it was still good to see that the remaining two survived thus far.

 

* * *

 

“As far as we can tell, the expansion of this place is probably many times larger than the surface area of an average colony planet. The chances of you or Jake finding a way out of this place after six days are next to impossible, Leigh. Are you sure?”

“Thanks for crushing dreams, doctor,” she said, though it was lightly spoken without any malice. “I did say ‘potentially’, did I not?”

“Yes, yes you did, child,” the heavily bearded and grey-haired scientist said, his eyes crinkling in laughter like an old grandfather.

She frowned a bit, the only maximum amount of displeasure she would ever express to the doctor for still treating her like she was not the veteran of the war she was. She knew that he would forever view her and Jake like children, having taken them under ONI’s wings when they were infants. The two of them had been willingly let go by both sets of parents, knowing what could be at stake if the Project did not succeed for they had also been under ONI’s wings. But just as she was about to reply, the leafy tent flap to the cartography and command center was opened and one of the few Marines that had been transported to this place entered.

“Pardon the intrusion, sirs and ma’am but we’ve just picked up a radio transmission from Team November. Spartans have survived and they’re coming.”

Leigh mentally breathed a sigh of relief though she kept the emotion off her face and said, “Good. Make sure Foxtrot watches their position; they may be wary and split into two teams to scout out the area.” The Marine nodded and quickly left, leaving the three people alone.

“Well, at least we know that some of them from Camp Currahee survived,” the graying scientist, Dr. Anton Reinhart, said, stroking his beard a bit. “Perhaps others of the team survived…”

“Maybe…but at least Lieutenant Commander Ambrose will be able to take command,” she replied.

“Not fond of leadership, are we, Leigh?”

“I never wanted it, Anton,” she softly said feeling her second-in-command, close friend, and the only one left of the three-man team she used to lead, place a comforting hand on her shoulder. The mission that had killed the third member of their small strike team had taken place over twelve years ago, but she just couldn’t completely move on and accept Eryn’s death. The buoyantly cheerful and outgoing woman was like a younger sister to her and Jake, and she still had haunting dreams about those last few moments when they were escaping the planet – how she could have done things differently.

“We all receive things that we never want,” the doctor said. “If only this war hadn’t started, then perhaps we would have never gone to these extremes.”

“Or we might have just decided to be our usual curious selves and still have awoken these Sentinels,” Jake said, slightly frustrated as he ran a hand through his shot-cropped hair. “Still no luck on cracking ciphers, doc?”

“No, and stop being such an impatient boy,” the doctor replied. “Six days is not enough to even crack the tip of the iceberg of this complicated technology. “You’d think that we shitted new tech out of our asses every single damn day for you guys.”

Leigh and Jake couldn’t help but crack small grins at the usage of coarse language from their mentor, and the overseer of the SPARTAN-1.0 and SPARTAN-1.1 projects. While it was rare to hear Dr. Reinhart curse, the man was a brilliant scientist and was prone to study new technologies without getting a wink of sleep, becoming quite ornery in the process. Leigh recalled that there was one time, while both she and Jake were still non-commissioned officers attached to ONI, the doctor had stayed up for at least a full week studying the initial captured Covenant technology. In the end, one of the other doctors had to sedate Dr. Reinhart so that the good doctor would not suddenly collapse on top of some delicate experiments out of sheer exhaustion.

“So, I guess its time to let Camp Currahee know who we are?” Jake asked after a few moments of silence.

“At least Commander Ambrose, my boy,” Anton replied. “After all, Beta-five has kept their secret better than the precursor project did. We’ll just make sure no one else finds out…and the commander has proven himself adept in keeping to the shadows.”

“Your call, doc,” Jake said, shrugging a bit.

The doctor merely gave them a smile before turning and leaving the tent. Leigh and Jake followed him, emerging into the still-bright-as-noon sunlight. Dr. Reinhart may have been Zone 67’s chief, but Leigh was the commander of what was left of the small military garrison attached to the zone. As the three of them reached the edge of camp, the lucky scientists and the four Marines left at the camp who had survived the sudden activation of the Sentinels, gathered around them. All of them wanted to see who else had survived, especially if they were Spartans.

First over the hill and onto the plateau was not who they expected. Instead of an SPI-armored Spartan, a tall, MJOLNIR-armored Spartan emerged, though the MJOLNIR armor was quite blackened. The Spartan was flanked by two SPI-armored Spartans, and Leigh recognized the two slightly-shorter Spartans, Tom and Lucy, by their gaits. Many a times during the training of Gamma Company, she had observed from the edge of Zone 67, the two of them setting up ambushes for the candidates. She and Jake had even helped free Lucy and Tom once during a training exercise, in which the young Spartans had been successfully ambushed by the Gamma Company candidates.

Her head visor with its one-eyed HUD hanging over her left eye identified the SPARTAN-II as SPARTAN-104, Frederic. That caused her to internally frown, for as far as she knew, no other SPARTAN-II was supposed to be on Onyx except for Lieutenant Commander Ambrose and the last she heard, the remaining SPARTAN-IIs who had not perished on Reach had been sent to Earth. Her visor also identified him as no longer an NCO, but a Lieutenant Junior Grade. What had happened on the surface in the few days that she and her people had been stuck in here?

Minutes later, more Spartans joined the three, and a few of them were pushing pod-like structures that floated at least a half-meter off the ground. Her visor identified the other two MJOLNIR-armored Spartans as Kelly-087 and Linda-058. Of the Gamma Company Spartans, she recognized Team Saber, except that two of their members were missing: Holly and Dante. She saw Dr. Halsey and Chief Mendez among them, and a small bit of elation and joy filled her, though she kept all her emotions tightly buttoned up. Not everyone from Camp Curahee had perished, though she was concerned for she did not see the Lieutenant Commander among them.

“Come on Leigh,” Dr. Reinhart said, walking forward, “it’s not nice to let guests linger at the door way.”

She followed him, as did Jake, and they heard the good doctor greet the newly found survivors, saying, “Welcome Spartans, Dr. Halsey, and Chief Mendez to what’s left of ONI’s Zone sixty-seven.”

 

* * *

 

“Dr. Reinhart,” Dr. Halsey stated, pushing her glasses up a bit on the bridge of her nose.

Fred heard the flat, yet subtle chill in her address of the grey-bearded, wrinkled scientist who, despite everything, had a smile on his face. How the scientist knew who Chief Mendez was, he could only guess, but it seemed that Dr. Halsey knew who exactly the elderly man was. However, he did not miss the slight tightening of both former Blue Team teammates, Leigh and Jake, of their grips on their rifles as soon as Dr. Halsey had stated the elderly scientist’s name. However, he couldn’t help but feel a bit suspicious. The elderly doctor had addressed all of them save Dr. Halsey and Chief Mendez as Spartans. Not the SPARTAN-IIIs as Marines or ODSTs…all of them as Spartans.

“Come, come,” the elderly doctor said, gesturing with his arm, “we shouldn’t be standing out here, baking in the sun. You all must be exhausted. Come.”

Fred stayed put where he was, that is until Dr. Halsey merely shook her head a bit and muttered, “Of all the places…” Surprisingly, it was not Dr. Halsey who moved forward first, but Chief Mendez who was followed closely by the doctor. Winking green across to his team, they moved forward, though he did notice that both Leigh and Jake merely shaking their heads a bit at Dr. Reinhart’s choice of words. The camp was a safe haven, albeit it was a strange safe haven, but it was good to find others who survived, though he didn’t voice his suspicions over TEAMCOM.

“Sir,” Ash whispered over TEAMCOM, as they walked into the camp, rifles all pointed down though their grips were not loose, “I recognize that lady with the doctor. Thought she was only an apparition or I was hallucinating, but during one of the days we were training near zed-six-seven, I thought I saw her sitting on one of the hills beyond the fenced-off place. Don’t know what she was doing though…”

“Then you got sniped by someone from Team Rapier,” Mark quipped over TEAMCOM.

Fred glanced over to Kelly and she said over TEAMCOM, “Those two were a part of Blue Team a long time ago. They’re not Spartans, but they’re almost just as good as we all are.”

A series of winking lights flashed over their HUDs as Lucy said in Morse code: ‘Those two freed Tom and I during training a couple of years ago. I thought they were ghosts.’

“Oh, that’s not fair,” Olivia groused, for she and her team remembered that it had taken the combined efforts of Team Saber and Team Machete to catch Tom and Lucy, who had been leading them on a chase for five whole days, only for the two to mysteriously get loose again.

“The doctor didn’t call the ‘kids’ ODSTs or Marines,” Linda whispered to him over a direct, single-beam COM burst. “He called them Spartans.”

“Stay alert,” he replied.

The camp was small and very sparse, only a few leaf-like tent structures had been strapped together. In the center of the camp, with some tall trees hanging over it, was a large, dug-out pit with a small amount of embers cooling that was about to be fed into a fire again by a couple of Marines carrying some wood. Strange long planks of wood that looked to be sliced from some bullet rounds and possibly a medical laser scalpel, judging from the multiple blackened edges, were crowded beneath another cluster of trees and there were a few laptops on the planks. The other three scientists, four in total counting Dr. Reinhart, quietly left them and returned to their laptops, though he could see them glancing occasionally back at the group. There were four Marines at the camp, but none of them gawked and stared at the Spartans. They too were well disciplined like the other sniper-spotter pairs.

That made the entire military force of this camp, not counting the Spartans, totaled to be ten. Not much, but more firepower when it came to them getting out of the Shield World, though there would be more civilians that needed to be protected. He didn’t doubt that the Sentinels that had chased them into here would be waiting for them if they found a way out. Of the Covenant forces, well, at least the ground forces that had surrounded them had been obliterated by Kurt’s activation of the FENRIS warheads. He refused to doubt that his friend and teammate had not triggered the warheads.

They arrayed themselves beneath the large trees, sitting near the small fire. The pods stayed with them. Judging from the semi-relaxed nature that the scientists and the Marines carried themselves in, there were certainly no hostile forces in the area. Fred knew that the former members of Blue Team would not be so casual with security and if they did not have their own helmets on, then this place was not expected to be a combat zone. However, they all did initially think that this world was completely empty. Still, things looked safe enough for now.

“At ease, Spartans,” he said over TEAMCOM before switching it off and removed his helmet. The others did the same, and he could see those in the SPI armors sweating profusely – those armors were not designed for long-term use and with the firefights they’ve been in, their armors needed repair. He could only do minor field repairs to his own, but for the others, he didn’t know where to begin.

“We were expecting Lieutenant Commander Ambrose to be among you,” Dr. Reinhart said as they settled down. “What happened?”

 

* * *

 

Everything that he did in his life, Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez did not regret, except for only one thing, and that was not seeing his daughter grow up. But now surprisingly seeing her sitting tall, and it brought a small spark of joy and fatherly pride that he had thought was gone after all his years of training recruits and watching video footage of nearly six hundred SPARTAN-IIIs die. He considered all those he trained in his long years as a drill and hand-to-hand combat instructor his sons and daughters, his extended family, but to now see his blood-and-flesh daughter all grown up was quite a shock to him. Where had all the years gone?

He didn’t even need to think hard about it; the years had gone into the war that was slowly rendering extinction upon Humanity. Even with the amount of troops that he heard that were trying to fight each day, even with each company he and Kurt had trained, he knew that it was not enough. A few more years and Humanity would go the way of the dinosaurs, even if the UNSC had remote outposts such as Onyx.

As surprised as he was to see Leigh sitting before him, he was also immensely relieved that she had not been among the dead when Zone 67 was attacked, though he was curious as to how she and the few others in the camp had escaped. The good Dr. Reinhart he immediately recognized, though he and the doctor had not spoken in a long time, he still looked the same except with a few more white hair and wrinkles. He briefly wondered if she had known that he was on this world but pushed the thought away – with Dr. Reinhart most likely leading the team, it meant that everyone at the camp was ONI Section Zero, it was their job to monitor a lot of the UNSC operations and everything that ONI did. And not only were they assigned to Zone 67 and the Forerunner artifacts there, he could definitely surmise that they had also been assigned to watch over the SPARTAN-III Project.

No, missing the fact that his daughter grew up without him being there, being raised only by her strong-willed mother, was the only thing he regretted. By the time he had seen her and the other two that had survived ‘the process’, they were already a little past the legal age to enlist and he had seen them and was one of their drill instructors at their boot camp session. If only his daughter had been born a year later, then perhaps she would have been a part of the candidate pool that Dr. Halsey would have selected to be SPARTAN-IIs.

He respected and admired Dr. Halsey, but over the course of the years he had known her, that woman had changed from being cold and unemotional to now a little too emotionally vested in the Spartans, though he did hear the distinct chill in her tone when she had initially addressed Dr. Reinhart. How the doctor found her way to Onyx, he had good guesses, but he would never turn away a gift horse that carried more firepower. Secretly, he was still amazed that the doctor had still not discovered the existence of Section Zero, considering he remembered her being Dr. Reinhart’s student all those years ago when he was still working for Section Zero. There were just some things that ONI hid quite well enough, and he felt proud to have been a part of the whole thing, though he would never say it. It was only a part of his duty to Humanity.

“We were expecting Lieutenant Commander Ambrose to be among you. What happened?” Dr. Reinhart asked.

Silence fell upon all of them and he knew that none of them wanted to talk about what had happened in the past seven days. Dr. Reinhart and his team needed to know what they were going to face up there if they ever made it out, and he did not want Section Zero to extract information in other ways that would make things very awkward. Turning slightly to the Lieutenant, he asked, “Sir, if I may?”

With a nod from the Lieutenant, he began to explain what had happened, starting from the Top Honors exercise that the three remaining Gamma Company teams on Onyx were engaged in. There was no need for him to explain the SPARTAN-III Project, though he could see the slight confusion in the Spartan’s eyes as to why he glossed over any explanations about the SPARTAN-III Project. He told them about the Sentinels and of what he had seen from the watchtower about explosions in Zone 67, which got a slight twitch reaction from the doctor and from his daughter, along with the other sitting next to her whom he knew well, Jake Creighton. Where the third member of their tiny, close group was, Eryn O’Malley, he didn’t know…had she not survived the Sentinels?

He continued on, telling them about the arrival of Dr. Halsey and the rest of Blue Team, their successful destruction of the Sentinel Production Facility, the arrival of the Covenant, and finally, their escape into the Shield World. Everything that had happened the last few days, he didn’t leave out.

“A Slipspace portal,” Dr. Reinhart murmured, frowning in thought for a bit before muttering, “that might just explain the seismic activities we had a couple of days ago.” The doctor suddenly clapped his hands together and said, “So there are many ways to get in but so far, no way to get out…yet. As for what’s left of our team, we were transported here via a Monitor. We lost audio and visual contact with our aye-ai after we were transported here, but we still received data from him, including what I suspect, the files you’ve given him, Dr. Halsey.”

Dr. Halsey bristled a bit, but composed herself and asked, “What exactly were you studying in Zone 67? Did you set off the Sentinels?”

Dr. Reinhart looked a bit affronted as he replied, “We did not. But judging from the data we pulled from Endless Summer before all contact was lost, perhaps the activation of these Halo Arrays have set off the Sentinels. As for what we were studying here, well, I afraid that you do not have that clearance, because despite all the access and clearances that you’ve received in Section Three, we’re not Section Three, doctor.”

Franklin mentally sighed; leave it to Dr. Reinhart to play with words and confuse everyone. Despite Dr. Reinhart’s illustrious but hidden career in Section Zero, the man had a strange sense of humor and often used it to keep everyone off guard. But it seemed that this time the aging doctor wasn’t going to play with words and said in a straight-forward manner, “By the orders of Admirals Parangosky and Jackowitz in twenty-five-twenty-five, the original expedition crew was stripped down to a skeleton crew and I was appointed as its leader. However, I was also tasked to oversee the SPARTAN-III project and to ensure that Colonel Ackerson was not going to jeopardize anything from the project. I suspect, Dr. Halsey that you managed to outwit his personal aye-ai and get the coordinates to this world. That man never learned proper encryption codes… The Monitor that transported us here could only teleport a few people, hence the ones you see around the camp, but it flew off to God knows where after it left us here. Before it left, I believe it was saying something about trying to control the Sentinels or parameters of the Sentinels.”

In a softer tone, Dr. Reinhart said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Spartans.”

Silence hung over the fire pit for a few long moments.

“You’re Section Zero,” Dr. Halsey broke the silence first, nearly whispering her statement. “No one has that much control or knowledge over a Project without…” She trailed off, and instead of finishing her thought, she merely glanced over at Franklin.

He kept silent, knowing that Dr. Halsey suspected, but he hadn’t been authorized to speak of anything about Section Zero. However, Dr. Reinhart spoke up, “All projects need overseers, Dr. Halsey, including yours. Even if you built yours from the ashes of ORION, what we all had done to augment soldiers had to be kept safe, kept secret. Section Two may have a field day keeping the mythos of the SPARTAN-IIs alive, but Section Zero still has to make sure that no others know about the others, though it seems that Beta-five has done a good job so far with the three-point-zeroes.”

“All ‘we’ had done? ORION was disbanded in twenty-five-oh-six,” Dr. Halsey argued, but then faltered a bit, her frown turning into a suspicious look. Franklin saw her glance over at Leigh and Jake before her shrewd gaze returned to Dr. Reinhart. The others around the fire pit were silent, though he could see their minds ticking with a bit of logic, though they didn’t have the whole picture. “ORION was never truly abandoned, was it?”

“No,” Dr. Reinhart replied. “How do you think SPARTAN-II was approved? There had to be someone there to test the bio-augmentations before they were given to the two-point-zeroes and three-point-zeroes. I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out sooner, considering whom _we_ sent to train your Spartans…after all, it seems like Spartans are always training the next generation of Spartans. There were several one-point-zeroes to train your Spartans, ten one-point-ones to make sure that not all of the two-point-zeroes perished during augmentation, and sixteen one-point-ones to make sure that the three-point-zeroes didn’t all perish from their augmentations.”

Stony silence fell across the fire pit and Franklin knew that it was going to be a long day…though not between the Spartans, but between Dr. Reinhart and Dr. Halsey. He did not want to be a part of it at all, but it looked like he would not be able to avoid it.

 

~*~*~*~


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

2200 hours, November 6, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

Fred glanced over towards former Blue Team member, Jake, who had a mild look on his face. The other former Blue Team member, Leigh, had a neutral expression on her face that didn’t give anyone a clue as to what she thought of the conversation between Drs. Halsey and Reinhart. Looking back at his current team, he could see the small facial indicators from Kelly and Linda as to what they thought about the information. Surprised, yet also puzzled as to why, though looking back, the four missions that the then-Blue Team had completed with the three that they had adopted as a part of their team did start to make some sense.

It seemed that everything he, Kelly, and Linda knew about their two former teammates was a lie…or a half-truth.

Linda gave him a brief touch on his arm, dispersing his slightly troubling thoughts, refocusing him on the present; they all had too much time on their hands right now and nothing to focus on. After being so used to mission after mission, he never really had time to collect his thoughts and just think about what they had all gone through, but the two days that had passed had given him and his Spartans plenty of time. He inhaled a bit as the scent of the wood smoke filled his lungs and as the stony silence between Dr. Reinhart and Dr. Halsey got a bit more awkward.

The Gamma Company Spartans were watching the conversation with interest; Tom and Lucy both had nearly identical pensive frowns on their faces. He had never given much thought about the ethics of the SPARTAN-II Project. It was not his place to think of such things and it didn’t concern him. But to openly hear the two doctors arguing about the necessity for secrecy and of the augmentations, he wondered if there was something else that he was missing from the picture. He had always respected Dr. Halsey, but after what she had done, kidnapping Kelly and only giving them a mysterious parting saying that she had a top secret mission, during a critical part in their mission aboard the _Gettysburg_ , that respect was starting to crack.

She hadn’t spoken much to them during the couple of days they had been traveling, but she had been lingering near the pods, trying to crack them open using what data she had received from Cortana. Now however, Fred could see a trace of something that he couldn’t quite identify in the doctor’s eyes. It wasn’t anger or frustration, but something else. He was never good at reading subtle emotions from people; that was something Kurt had been very good at.

“Ten one-point-ones,” Dr. Halsey stated, “I assume that these two were a part of those ten?” She gestured towards Leigh and Jake, who merely looked back at her with slight interest.

“Correct,” Dr. Reinhart replied.

“What happened to the other eight? Where are the other sixteen one-point-ones?”

“You’ve examined the body of one of them: Petty Officer First Class Eryn O’Malley. The other seven did not survive augmentation. As for the sixteen, I believe they’re still on Earth,” Dr. Reinhart said.

Dr. Halsey frowned a bit, looking as if she considered dropping the subject all together, then asked, “Then have you found anything of significant value, Doctor?”

“Possibly,” Dr. Reinhart replied, his mouth splitting into a wide grin. “Its about twenty kilometers from here, up a near-vertical grade climb, but it could be a way out or into a structure of secrets. Who knows what Forerunner objects were prepared and left in this bomb shelter?”

That brought a spark of hope into everyone’s eyes, and if indeed it was one of the many treasure trove of Forerunner technology that was locked in the structure, then bringing it back to Earth was a top priority. The only other thing was how to get out. There was no luck so far in cracking the pods, but perhaps the additional scientists would be able to help. Fred hoped that that would be the case.

Instead of sharing Dr. Reinhart’s elation, Dr. Halsey merely shook her head a bit and pushed her glasses up her nose a bit more. “Then it seems that you’ve gotten further in Forerunner translations than I or Cortana did. Perhaps you could help try to find a way to extract these five from these Slipspace pods?” She gestured to the pods sitting further into the cluster of trees.

Fred saw the elderly doctor jump up; a little more robustly than what he looked for his age and hurry over to the pods. In his opinion, he thought that the elderly doctor was quite a strange man. The doctor positively looked a little too happy when he bent over one of the pods and closely examined the shell and the content that held the afterimage of one of Team Katana’s members.

“Hmmm,” Dr. Reinhart hummed for a bit before saying, “If I may, Dr. Halsey?”

Dr. Halsey merely gave a look to Fred who nodded, even though Ash and his team were looking a bit worriedly at the pods. He would have to trust Dr. Halsey on this one. She seemed to know Dr. Reinhart quite well and at least seemed to trust him, judging from the way she was reacting. He did however; slightly wonder why she was not happy earlier and why she had greeted Dr. Reinhart in such a cold tone. Dashing the fleeting curiosity away, he knew that that was none of his concern.

“Ah, Chief Mendez,” Dr. Reinhart said as he pushed one of the pods away from the fire pit and towards the far side of the camp, where the planks of wood and laptops were sitting at. “Please come with us, I have much to discuss with you regarding the past years.”

“Sir,” Chief Mendez said, giving Fred and the others a nod before hurrying to take the pod from the elderly scientist and Dr. Halsey.

Inquisitive eyes snapped back from the retreating backs of the scientists and Chief Mendez as they walked out of hearing range before Ash broke the silence, saying, “It makes sense how Chief Mendez was able to keep up with us. No offense meant to be implied, sir.”

Slightly awkward silence fell around the fire pit once again, but that was broken by Tom who was sitting near Jake and Leigh. “Thanks for freeing Lucy and I during one of the training exercises. I’m Tom.”

Surprisingly, Jake replied in a good-natured tone, “No problem. Creating frustrating situations for trainees is what we excel at.” He then introduced himself, “Jake. Jake Creighton.”

“Leigh Hattersfield, UNSC Navy ONI officer Lieutenant Junior Grade,” Leigh quietly introduced herself to the rest of the group, causing the rest of the Spartans except for Jake to sit up just a tad bit straighter, even if they were at ease. “Our aye-ai sent Commander Ambrose orders to assist us when the initial attack happened. I now rescind those orders because it may complicate the chain of command to have two see-ohs ordering you around. Therefore, Spartan-one-zero-four will remain your direct commanding officer.”

Though the Spartans were technically a part of the UNSC NavSpecWep, Fred knew that ONI still unofficially controlled them, and ONI officers still outranked a lot of Navy enlisted or officers, even if two were of the same grade. He could hear the countless years of being an officer in her tone, something he had heard often from other officers that had ordered the Spartans around. She sounded different than she had the last time he and Blue Team had been sent on a mission with the Section Zero team; confident but weary, though Jake still sounded the same.

But before any of them could snap off an acknowledgement, she continued, “Though this is a non-combat zone, Section Zero does not operate in the same military or civilian-controlled operational structures as the rest of ONI. Theoretically, we don’t exist, so saluting Lieutenant Creighton or I are not to be expected.”

There were nods and a few murmurs of ‘yes, ma’am’ around the fire pit, though Fred could see the slight confusion in the Spartans’ eyes. It seemed that Jake, no; Lieutenant Creighton was also an officer. Fred himself was slightly confused, but he understood enough of the implications – if they got back to Earth, then it would only be the SPARTAN-IIs who would be visible again. The SPARTAN-IIIs and the people at this camp would all vanish back into the secret folds of ONI, shadow organizations supporting the effort in the war.

She turned slightly and said, “Jake, please fill them in on the operational details,” then got up and left.

Fred noted that she was not walking towards where the scientists and Chief Mendez were, under the other cluster of trees, and walking towards the outskirts of the camp. He surmised that a patrol-watch change was about to take place; that would give him time to figure things out and get his questions that he knew that Lieutenant Creighton would possibly not be able to answer. Nearly thirty years of battlefield experience had taught him that there were just some things that could only be discussed commander-to-commander.

 

* * *

 

2245 hours, November 6, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

She felt the earth shake minutely with each footstep that a half-ton of MJOLNIR armor put on the ground before her HUD even displayed who was approaching. But even as the Spartan approached, she did not take her eyes off the re-calibrated sniper scope that was shared by the Marines who took watch and continued to scan the horizon as the details of the landscape scrolled through the single pane HUD over her left eye. Her spotter was supposed to be one of the Marines, Garrett, but had come down with a bad case of possible food poisoning by sampling a berry in the area, so she opted to take the shift herself, letting the HUD over her left eye be a sort-of spotter. Dr. Mosely was still working on her helmet after her ten-meter fall from the shear cliff face she had been free-climbing a couple of days ago, had cracked the helmet. There had been no enemy contacts reported in the six days they had set up camp here, and she was starting to doubt that there was anyone else that existed here, friendly or otherwise not.

As the Spartan settled down next to her, she finally flicked her eyes from the scope to see that while the familiar MJOLNIR helmet was still on, the faceplate was raised and the Spartan carried a pair of binoculars, most likely borrowed from one of the Marines. “Feels like a slap to the face, doesn’t it?” she said, letting her eyes see through the scope again.

“Ma’am?”

“Jake and I technically do not exist yet we’ve worked with you and Blue Team. Our ranks are only there because it allows Section Zero to give us certain clearances and nuclear armament codes in the event we’re compromised on a mission. Right now, I personally would like to keep the team of Marines and your team separate in the chain of command unless absolutely necessary,” she told him.

A brief pause of silence fell between them before her unofficial spotter replied, “Understood…ma’am…Leigh.” There was another few minutes of silence before she heard, “Welcome back to Blue Team.”

“Thank you, sir,” she quietly replied. “I’m sorry that we had to deceive you and the rest of Blue Team all those years ago.” The statement that her unofficial spotter had said about welcoming her and Jake back to the team that they had been adopted into made her a bit uncomfortable yet relieved at the same time. However, if they were going to operate as a cohesive team by blurring the lines between Section Zero and Section Three, between Spartans, all for the sake of survival, then there was one more thing she had to ask. “Sir, I’d like to get to know the rest of Blue Team. Do I have permission to address you and your team by your given names instead of service numbers?”

That was the only differentiator between her duty as a Section Zero operative and the legacy that flowed through her blood. In all the missions she had gone on with the Spartans, only team numeric had been said over the com and she had marked them by their service numbers. But looking back, and though the list of the missing-in-action SPARTAN-II’s and SPARTAN-III’s and comparing it to the killed-in-action list of the SPARTAN-I’s and SPARTAN-I.I’s, they were a legacy of super soldiers. They were an awkward family at best, but still a part of the nexus that swirled around the legends surrounding the SPARTAN-IIs.

Leigh and Jake could easily stay out of the limelight and their records were completely sealed – never to be opened, but they would not be able to escape the fact that they were also Spartans, at least not to this group of surviving Spartans. It was better to know allies and their abilities to better predict their reaction against enemy forces, but it would also open up the possibility that the distant shell she had built for the past years would shatter.

The death of Eryn was the greatest weight on her shoulders, but it didn’t blot out the fact that the other two of her team, David and Xing-Hua also perished under her watch. Those three were her family more than just teammates – they were the epitome of the loss of so many irreplaceable people, as were all the other SPARTAN-II’s listed as missing-in-action, or the nearly six hundred SPARTAN-III’s sent on suicide operations by Colonel Ackerson. She would try to keep as best of a distance from the Spartans as best as she could without compromising herself, but it was going to be hard for she no longer had their ignorance to play off on.

Damn Dr. Reinhart and Dr. Halsey and their egos.

“Granted,” her spotter said, though she heard the slight hesitation in his voice.

“Thank you…Spartan-one-zero-four…Frederic,” she said.

The SPARTAN next to her said nothing for a few minutes before almost inaudibly muttering, “Fred…not Frederic…”

There it was, a small extension of trust and friendship, and she accepted it, saying, “And it’s not Hattersfield for me…its Mendez. Leigh Mendez. I recognized the blade you gave me…it was my father’s blade…he took it when he left for a long-term assignment to Reach…to train the next generation of Spartans.”

She heard a very soft, slight shift as her spotter absorbed her words, but didn’t take her eyes off the scope. The near-silence of the area fell upon the small hill that was one of the watch posts, and only the sounds of the nocturnal creatures punctured the silence, despite the sun still blazing overhead. Her mental clock told her that only a few more hours were left in her shift before she could get at least an hour’s shut-eye. But that silence was shattered as her com crackled a bit and one of the now-considered-lucky scientists to have survived came through, voice a bit garbled.

“Leigh, this is Base. Doctor Mosely says that your helmet’s fixed…and there’s actually a decent stew brewing, courtesy of some fresh MREs. Spartan-zero-five-eight has also taken over Team India’s shift.”

“Copy, Base,” she replied after she tapped the side of her visor that was hooked around her left ear. “Tell the good doctor thanks, and save at least three bowls. I have a spotter here that also needs some food.”

“Copy, Leigh…over and out,” the radio operator back at the small camp said. She tapped the small button that turned off the com and turned her full attention to the landscape and the scope of the sniper rifle.

“How many Marines were in your company?”

“Two platoons totaling at fifty,” she replied. “Teams Foxtrot, India, Lima, and November are what’s left. The original platoon of Marines was only about twenty, until a Beta Company training team was reported missing back in thirty-nine. ONI called the rest of us in after that. The scientific staff numbered at twenty-three, and all have been here since twenty-five or stationed here after. There have been no transfers of the scientific staff or military out of Onyx since their assignment here. Permanent residents.”

“Proficiencies?”

“They’re not ODSTs, but they’re proficient in all weaponry, though Teams Foxtrot and November have high ratings in sniping. The only reason why these Marines were pulled from the battlefield is because they’ve all committed some form of gross misdemeanor. In exchange to remain active and not demoted by the UNSC, Section Zero made them disappear from UNSC files. Jake and I were initially sent here to search for the Beta Company training team, though we still had our fair share of off-world missions.”

“What happened before the explosion in the zone?”

“I was taking Lima with me on patrol through some of the excavated caverns. Due to the density of the walls between us and the main camp, we only felt the explosion and were then transported here. I found Jake, Foxtrot, India, and November nearly a half-kilometer off and the scientists near the stream. At first, we thought it was random, but the team agrees that the Monitor had been watching us for a long time – there is no logical reasoning why it would transport the chief scientist, a linguist with a good amount of Forerunner knowledge, a technologist, and a bio-engineer who has studied Forerunner artifacts. However, Mister Rousseau was an anomaly in our reasoning; he wasn’t an expert on anything and had just recently transferred here about a year ago,” she explained. “Everything else was just data drops that we kept receiving from Endless Summer, though we couldn’t identify who was sending the data or could we communicate with our aye-ai.”

The Spartan fell silent for a few long minutes and Leigh could see the theoretical gears turning in his head. She knew that he was thinking of tactical assessments of what she had briefed him about her Marines, whereas she already had a good sense and idea of tactical deployments for the other Spartans. It was the scientists that she was concerned with. Protecting civilians was one thing, but protecting the possibility that the people you worked with were you’re only hope of getting out of here just made life a tad bit harder. If they were injured, then it may prevent them from doing what was needed, and she did not doubt that there were most likely Sentinels still lingering outside the Shield World.

“I overheard Doctor Reinhart mentioning Human Preservation Vaults?”

She had not been expecting that question and had been expecting yet another tactical assessment one. If he had heard Dr. Reinhart most likely explaining to Dr. Halsey about the HPVs, then that was yet another mess she did not want to get involved in. She knew that Dr. Halsey had been a student of Dr. Reinhart all those long years ago, but she could only guess at what caused Dr. Halsey to give a chilly reception to Dr. Reinhart earlier.

Damn scientists and their egos.

Instead of directly answering, she said, “Too much time on your hands…too many thoughts start to crowd around, demanding attention… Missions that come one right after the other push away those thoughts, don’t they?”

There was no answer from her spotter and she didn’t expect any, for she knew that none of them really talked much…neither did her or Jake, though Eryn had been the chattiest and most outgoing of them all. Leigh preferred the company of her team, only superficially knowing her commanders and most of the people in Section Zero; the only exception being Dr. Reinhart. Eryn, chatted quite a bit with personnel and even sometimes sat away from her and Jake during their meal times, wanting to know all sorts of things. It was handy, but before the woman had been killed, she thought that Eryn carried the greatest risk of their Section Zero affiliation being leaked.

“The Human Preservation Vaults are on several remote colonies and each vault has about thirty or forty thousand souls currently living in there, acting as a preservation of Humanity’s knowledge and genetic make-up. Three vaults have already been glassed along with their colonies, only five remain. Section Two has done a great job with the propaganda, but if we lose this war, at least a few thousand souls have a chance to keep Humanity alive,” she stated.

 

The calm, perfectly golden savannah grass stretched out before his eyes, meeting only the sky and blending into the slight darkness before the halo of the sun was seen; and rolling hills graced this area of the shield world, but everything before his eyes was tinted green from the binoculars he had borrowed from one of the Marines. The calmness of the place was what bothered him, an untouched area that was confined to an impossibly small space yet held such a large surface.

Peaceful.

No missiles, gunfire, or plasma rounds whistling past his ears, no shouts over TEAMCOM or FLEETCOM, no adrenaline pumping through his body, no grunts or screeches of the Covenant translating across his HUD, no mission to look forward to so he didn’t have his thoughts lingering on all those who had died, all the friends and comrades he had lost…just absolute tranquility and stillness.

Fred was unnerved.

Leigh was right, there was too much downtime for them to think, to finally sit and take a deep breath, and he didn’t like it at all. As a person who had spent all his life training and fighting, for the first time he didn’t know what to do, and so he had found something to do; at least something to keep him occupied. But just staring out at the calm, open landscape before him didn’t help much, even if he kept telling himself that he was the spotter in their sniper pair. It was just too peaceful to be true in this place.

He took a deep breath and slowly, silently blew it out, trying to control the multitude of thoughts running through his mind. The tactical assessments he had made with the information about the Marines had taken him less than a second. He had never thought that someone else’s voice that he was not so familiar with would become a wonderful distraction to the once-organized-and-now-disorganized thoughts and once-sharp-focus that he thought he had. But Leigh’s explanation of the Human Preservation Vaults was short and concise, yet still just enough to calm his thoughts down a bit.

If it had been any other circumstance, he would have filed away the small amount of trustful information that Leigh had given him and would have at least considered it later, but now that he had time… As surprised as he was to find out that Chief Mendez had a daughter, he had recognized the customized combat blade move that he remembered seeing Leigh use to cut into an Elite on the third mission that Blue Team and her three-person team had been on. Back before they had fully become Spartans, Chief Mendez had shown them nearly the same exact move on a dummy…except without a grenade. He had long suspected that the three-person team was not exactly ODST, considering the third mission was more of a political one than the ones that the Spartans were used to, or ODSTs were sent on.

Back then, he had thought that she was the only non-SPARTAN to have successfully killed an Elite in hand-to-hand combat, albeit that most of it was by the virtue of a well-placed plasma grenade. Her blade had broken and while she was recovering from her wounds, he had taken a closer look at the broken blade and realized that it was manufactured with the same carbide as the one Chief Mendez had given him. That blade had been given to him after one of the many grueling days in training, for what reason, he never fully understood. When now-deceased teammate, Eryn O’Malley, had explained to them about the blade, it reflected Chief Mendez’s philosophy that though a weapon was constantly replaceable, it could save lives in unexpected ways and therefore, should be cared for.

Linda had done that with every sniper rifle she encountered and used, and it made perfect sense – they needed to use what ever they had, even if it was just a pistol and a combat knife. But it wasn’t the fact that Leigh’s blade broke that he had given Chief Mendez’s blade to her; he saw and respected the fact that she was most definitely an incredible close-quarters combat person – she needed the blade more than he did. As to naming the broken blade, he found that strange, but didn’t linger on the thought – ODSTs were a prideful bunch that he tried to steer clear of.

But now, neither she nor Jake were ODSTs…they were…he didn’t know what they truly were…precursors to the SPARTAN-II project, yes. ODSTs, certainly not and now that he remembered, most definitely not – their reaction times were almost as fast as SPARTAN-IIs and SPARTAN-IIIs. But they were Spartan, just like the rest of them, and even the surprise revelation that Chief Mendez was one of the many originals did not change his thoughts…

_The five SPARTAN-IIIs had left just a few moments earlier to help with the preparation of food and to explore the place some more. Only Linda and Kelly were left around the fire pit, and Kelly nudged a log further into the crackling fire with a foot. She said, “Let’s hope that John’s saved us some Covenant to kill because three generations of Spartans are coming.” She fell silent for a few long moments before saying, “What’s your take on them? Lieutenants Hattersfield and Creighton?”_

“ _They’re Spartans, like us,” Linda quietly said, “they proved themselves in the missions we’ve been on with them…they’re still Blue Team.”_

_Rarely did Linda ever say anything regarding the team, and whenever she spoke about team dynamics, it was a surprise though still a valuable assessment. She was still the ‘lone wolf’ of the group, but she was very observant of team dynamics and abilities whenever she participated in Blue Team’s missions._

“ _Doctor Reinhart?” he asked._

“ _Not sure,” Kelly said, shaking her head a bit. “Chief Mendez seems to trust him, but Doctor Halsey…I don’t know.”_

“ _Our chain of command is military, not civilian,” he reminded them, “and certainly not from the scientists of Section Zero--” he didn’t want to say it, but it had to be said—“or from Doctor Halsey.”_

“ _Yes, sir.”_

Linda was right: _they’re Spartans, just like us_.

Fred focused his thoughts back on the present; it had only taken him less than a minute to organize his thoughts and he felt calmer now.

“If you need your armor examined, speak to Doctor Mosely. She one of the many technicians that has worked on both Project MJOLNIR and the es-pe-aye armors,” Leigh spoke up.

He automatically winked an acknowledgement through his turned-up faceplate before he could stop himself. However, Leigh said nothing and he asked, “Where is the potential exit?”

“About twenty kilometers relatively west if you count the camp as north, from here, but through very rough terrain that’s almost a vertical climb,” she replied, and he saw a few lights flicker on his HUD. He flicked his face plate back down, edging the binoculars away and continued to stare through the lenses as he saw the small, rough topographical map upload to his HUD. “The top has a strange-looking structure with Forerunner glyphs, I think…but judging from its height, it’s either a way out of this place or an entrance to something else. Jake and I spent the better part of a day trying to scale the face and exploring the place, but that looks like the only entrance.”

He frowned as he studied the topographical map with one eye and the other was still processing the green-tinged landscape through the binoculars. It wouldn’t be much for the Spartans or the eight Marines to scale the face, but the scientists… Both Dr. Halsey and Dr. Reinhart were elderly, though he had no doubt that Dr. Halsey would be able to successfully scale the face, though at a slower pace. She was a tough old bird, but he didn’t even know if Dr. Reinhart would be able to get up the face – the doctor looked to be almost pushing eighty.

“Dr. Reinhart is tough,” Leigh said, somewhat dispersing his doubts. “Ornery at times, but he’ll be able to climb the face, though most likely not at the pace that I’d be happy with.”

“None of the scientists will,” he muttered, lifting his faceplate again as he focused both eyes through the binoculars. He had not seen any rope in the camp, and the leafy tents that had been built were lashed down with short vines. They had some rope, but not enough for everyone to climb at a quick pace and most likely not long enough to span the entire cliff face. A quick trip around the outskirts of the camp had shown him that the vines were tough, but pliable, though he doubted that they could make such a long, strong rope to hoist the weight of at least two people up such a vertical rise with much efficiency. There was also the matter of the Slipspace pods…how were they going to get those up?

“There are enough of us here to carry them on our backs when we climb,” Leigh suggested.

He silently nodded; it wouldn’t be the first time that the Spartans did something that strange and it would not be the last.

 

* * *

 

0300 hours, November 7, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

Jake couldn’t help but smile a bit as he saw a couple of the SPARTAN-IIIs pouring over the roughly sketched topographical map on one of the datapads that the scientists loaned them. He could tell that they were itching to do something and were trying to stave off boredom. Hours ago, a couple of them had helped with the stew while he saw Spartan-B292 and Spartan B-091, Tom and Lucy, wander off and now were most likely circling the perimeter of the camp. He could tell right away that Tom and Lucy were an inseparable pair, having survived the operation that had almost eradicated all of Beta Company, and the battle that had gone up above on Onyx’s surface. Those two reminded him of him and Leigh, closer than brother-sister-at-arms, more like shadows of each other and siblings.

Now however, he saw one of the SPARTAN-IIIs sitting among a few of the Marines that had a short time off or had been relieved of their duty by SPARTAN-058, Linda. They were cleaning what little weapons they had by the fire, though some of the Marines were trying to engage the quiet Spartan in conversations. These Marines were definitely not like the usual – they respected and admired the Spartans but didn’t give them preferential treatment like he had heard so many average Marines in the UNSC do. It was because they were specifically recruited into Section Zero and given certain clearances about all the things that Section Zero monitored, even if they had gross misdemeanors on their records. The only other Spartan that he didn’t know where she was was SPARTAN-087, Kelly. He hadn’t seen her since she had a quick bite to eat as soon as the stew was done, but he wasn’t concerned.

“Uh oh, the world’s about to end,” a familiar voice that he hadn’t heard in a very long time said as he turned around and wiped the smile off his face.

“Sir?” he asked, though he kept his tone light as Chief Mendez walked up and stood next to him with the familiar Sweet William cigar in his mouth.

“I could tell that you were smiling,” the Chief said, shaking his head a bit. “The world ended with you flat on the ground the last time you smiled.”

“What, I captured the flag,” he stated. His informal tone with the Chief was a familiar thing for he knew that the Chief knew that their officer rank was there only for clearance and armament codes purposes. Section Zero had kept them at Ensign for as long as they could before they were forced by ONI though UNSC pressuring to promote them to Lieutenant Junior Grades. Any more, and they would have to start serving on one of the many Prowlers…which he and Leigh were not fond of.

“Not in my books…you didn’t see that attack coming.”

“You’re right, I should have watched my back,” he admitted. “How have you been, Chief?”

“You should know…monitoring us day and night,” Mendez replied, taking a long drag before puffing out a large ring of smoke.

“Still spry as a spring chick--”

“Who are you calling a chick?” the Chief said, a bit indignant.

“No one, sir,” he replied, keeping his face as straight as possible. He had missed the banter he used to carry on with the Chief before they had all gone their separate ways in the war. Eryn was better at it with her dry humor and quick wit, but he managed to sometimes surprise the Chief enough to elicit a rare smile out of him. But with Eryn having been dead for so many years…he was sorely out of practice.

“What happened to Eryn?” Mendez quietly asked as he blew out another smoke ring.

“She was killed as we were trying to escape on our mission before we got reassigned to Onyx. We took her dog tags to her family on Reach,” he stated. “We also had two one-point-ones upgraded to two-point-zeroes with us on that mission…David and Xing-Hua. David took a blast from a Hunter’s fuel rod cannon, and Xing-Hua stayed behind to chain off the explosion through one of their ships. Sergeant Andersen and Chief Petty Officer Dong have both been informed of their child’s deaths.”

“So it did work then,” the Chief thoughtfully said after a few moments of silence. “Is that why Anton wanted Miss James and her group to be retrieved from Earth?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I’m surprised the doc even mentioned that to you. He did consider Leigh, Eryn, and I candidates, along with a few of the less-adversely affected one-point-zeroes as candidates before determining that we were all too old to be able to survive a second augmentation.” For a few minutes, neither said anything and he finally asked, “How are they, Chief? The Spartans?”

“As best as they can be, considering all that’s happened,” Mendez said, letting the cigar hang on his fingers for a bit. “I’ll give them another hour of being bored before I give them an exercise. It’s too peaceful here.”

“You just haven’t thought of it yet, haven’t you?” he asked, slightly dubious.

“Oh yes I have,” Mendez said, returning the cigar to his mouth. “And you’re a part of it. Gather your Marines, Jake. This is going to be an exercise that I’d like to call Team Oddball.”

 

* * *

 

0530 hours, November 7, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

“Hey Jeri, what d’you think of the new guys?”

“They’re giants,” she replied, sighing a bit as she pushed a few embers around with a stick. “Even the threes are tall…but they’re cool. Why are you asking, Carver?”

“Just wondering,” her partner-in-crime wistfully said. “But damn, I think Doctor Halsey gives me the creeps more than Doctor Yelchin…its like two ice-queens together in the same room can even freeze Hell over.”

“Well, lucky for you, at least Doctor Reinhart’s keeping them occupied,” she said, pushing yet another crackling ember and log further into the fire with her stick before waving the now on-fire tip around. Light afterimages could be seen, but as the flame died down and the tip turned into charcoal, she stuck it back in the fire and repeated the same thing over for the next few minutes.

“I wonder where Chief Mendez took the rest of the Spartans and the rest of our group off to,” Carver said, breaking the atmospherically serene silence. “Garrett’s still suffering from indigestion, isn’t he?”

“Don’t know…I did hear the el-tee muttering something about a crazy game of Oddball,” she said, poking the stick for the fifth time back into the fire.

“What?” Carver said, nearly standing up from his seat around the fire. “And he didn’t tell us?!”

“Sit, you,” Jeri ordered, shaking her head a bit in exasperation. “Trust me…we have it lucky…I made up an excuse to keep us out of the game…because I think there might be broken bones by the end of the Oddball session…especially if the rest of our guys are playing against Spartans.”

The Marine was silent for a few long moments before he slowly nodded in agreement. “Yeah…I think you’re right…thanks for saving my ass, Jeri.”

“It’s my job,” she simply replied. “Now…since I’m in charge, make sure the stew’s warmed up for El-tee Hattersfield and the other two Spartans. They’re due back from watch any time now.”

“What? Why me?” Carver protested.

“Because you owe me for saving our asses,” she said, poking her stick completely in the fire and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Yes, mom,” Carver dully said, but suddenly grinned as his partner-in-crime merely shook her head in exasperation.

 

* * *

 

1000 hours, November 7, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

Sunny-filled skies with only a hint of clouds greeted Dr. Halsey when she emerged from the leafy tent, the only one left standing, for the others and the camp had already been neatly packed away. There were a couple of Marines running around, gathering last minute objects or lassoing as best as they could, the rest of the Slipspace pods with roughly hewed ropes made out of the pliable but itchy and sticky vines that had been used to lash the tents down. She was slightly annoyed that she hadn’t been woken up earlier, but with her laptop secure under her arm, she quickly made her way towards Lieutenant Hattersfield, who looked to be directing the operations. In the distance, she saw two pairs of Marines already ahead, with packs on their back, and the Gamma Company Spartans jogging ahead, most likely scouting the place to ensure that there were no ambushes or enemies hiding ahead.

She highly doubted that there was anyone else, Covenant or otherwise Forerunner that existed in the place, but even with the three days they had been here since entering the Slipspace portal, no one seemed to be relaxed yet. The unofficial medical doctor, Dr. Miranda Yelchin, of the small Section Zero group was still lingering in the camp, as was the expedition assistant Neil Rousseau, and Chief Mendez, but it looked like Fred, Linda, and Kelly had already gone ahead with the second group…or at least Fred and Kelly had. Linda most likely was already way ahead of the small groups, hiding somewhere in the rough terrain, keeping an eye on the landscape. Tom and Lucy were geared up and ready to go, and as soon as she approached Lieutenant Hattersfield, she turned to give her full attention.

“Good morning, Doctor,” the Lieutenant said, giving her a nod.

Pleasantries aside, Dr. Halsey only had a general impression of Lieutenant Hattersfield as a leader that strove to keep all her troops alive, not having a chance at all to speak with her. Since they had arrived in the small camp, she had found her former mentor’s degree of concealment and hidden secrets of Section Zero a bit more intriguing than the possibility that there were other Spartans other than the ones who had escaped into this world with her. Not that she had been surprised at the news that Chief Mendez had been a part of the original program – she had studied the results of Project ORION, but now that she had a chance…to find out what she wanted to know.

Over three decades of guilt lingered inside of her, and now there were more. After overhearing her former mentor and Chief Mendez discussing the sixteen teenagers stuck on Earth, she couldn’t let Dr. Reinhart turn more into Spartans, stripping away their lives, yet she couldn’t let Humanity die either. Conflict roiled though her, but the slim chance of actually escaping this place that she sought to keep her Spartans in here had given way to a dangerous thought in her mind. She dared not speak it, for she had observed the actions that the scientists, even if so few of them were left – Section Zero did monitor _everything_ …all words, conversations, it seemed that they knew almost all of ONI’s operations, even those supposedly kept top secret. She had thought Section Three was the secret child of ONI, but it seemed that Section Zero was the true secret bastard child that waited in the shadows, ready to strike when the time was right.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said, keeping the tone of her voice short and concise as she blanked the biofeed and statuses she was receiving through her glasses from the short-range wireless network that thankfully still worked. It had taken her the greater part of her time spent in the leafy tent alone, with her micro-AI, Jerrod, to crack into the highly secured network. Of course, the first thing that the Section Zero camp did was to decrypt the BROADCOM network to let their newly found survivors in to certain conversations, but she was sure that Lieutenant Hattersfield had set up a highly encrypted, private TEAMCOM network between her, the Marines, her second-in-command, and the Spartans. It would take time to crack that, but she had a hunch that they would have plenty of time.

“Pleasant sleep?” Lieutenant Hattersfield asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “Why was I not woken?”

“Doctor Reinhart thought you would need your strength today, considering the terrain and speed we’re going to be traveling at,” the Lieutenant said, though Dr. Halsey could hear a slightly condescending tone in her voice.

Anger and irritation flared up inside of her, but before she could get a word in, the Lieutenant and donned her helmet and said over BROADCOM, “Move out.”

The first time she had spoken to Lieutenant Hattersfield, her scans had told her that the woman was only a Chief Petty Officer, and that had been in the morgue on ONI’s stealth ship, _Perseus’s Rebellion_. She had been examining the body of Petty Officer First-Class Eryn O’Malley, after some cajoling done to Commander Ferrico, for she had seen the wounds that the non-Spartans that had survived, had sustained. Of course, she had known about the red-headed ODST, who had a knack for surviving impossible odds, but the other two, whom she now suspected as then-undercover CPOs Hattersfield and Creighton, were curious cases. Not one UNSC soldier had survived the type of wounds that had peppered the two bodies, and she wanted to know if the UNSC had taken her supposed-to-be secret work on the SPARTAN-IIs and applied it to regular soldiers.

Hence her examination of PO1 O’Malley…and the brief, oddly tensed conversation she had with Lieutenant Hattersfield. Thinking about it now, she suspected something about the two who survived, but she hadn’t known then how close she had been to cracking the truth. She didn’t like Lieutenant Hattersfield; the woman held too much knowledge about her projects, the research she had done, and about the SPARTAN-II program. It was enough that Colonel Ackerson had gone though her files, but oversight by a group that almost no one in ONI knew existed… She couldn’t tell if the Lieutenant or her second-in-command could be trusted…but if her hunch was correct in that the Lieutenant was one to quote the old pre-colonization military creedo of ‘leave no man behind’…could she successfully convince her of the plan?

“Ma’am,” one of the Marines who were walking beside her on the rough, rapidly rising grade terrain, spoke up, holding a small canteen of water near her face. “Would you like some?”

She took the canteen of water and drank a bit before handing it back to the Marine and nodding her thanks. If they were to stay here permanently, she still would not express the social needs of the many, including pleasantries and getting to know those around her. However, if it would help them survive, then she would at least carry as civil, distant conversations as possible. Saving her Spartans was always first, and if anything got in that way…then there were always other options.

 

* * *

 

1100 hours, November 7, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

“Dad,” she stated as the cool breeze crept into her face, though her helmet was still on her head with the faceplate up, COM muted though she could still hear the chatter through BROADCOM. The modified helmet was originally a SPI Mark II armored helmet, but thanks to Dr. Mosely, it was almost akin to a MJOLNIR helmet. Her and Jake’s armors were also a cross in between the traditional SPI Mark II armor that the SPARTAN-IIIs wore and the old MJOLNIR Mark IV armor, though it didn’t not have the enhanced reactive circuits of the MJOLNIR but slightly more adaptive stealth and regenerative shield technology. Not that it was going to be of any use here…

“Leigh,” her father answered as he walked beside her, the same Sweet William cigar that she had seen hours earlier still in his mouth. He was conserving what little amounts he had left…all of them were, and it was not just the narcotic that she remembered him loving so much. She didn’t know what medication he took for his side effects from the one-point-zero project, but under the advice of Dr. Yelchin, both she and Jake had already taken a half-reduction of their usual dosage of their own sets of medication to keep their side effects at bay. She could still function without her medication, but it was painful for her to, and when she had woken up after her hour sleep, she had felt a slight twinge of pain that crawled up her body.

She had survived the final injection, the carbide ossicification of the bones, but it left her skin quite painfully sensitive, especially if she moved fast and her skin rubbed against the body suit that was under her armor. It was similar to the feeling of freezer burn that every person who was un-frozen from the cryo pods got, except she felt that it was worse. She thought Jake had it worse – he involuntarily twitched every so often, as if having a half-second seizure, but his medication helped him by giving him a steady hand, though he had come out with fast reaction times. But out of the three one-point-ones of ten that survived, Eryn had come out the worst; she came out with bearable, but sometimes extremely painful arthritis, kept only at bay with heavy dosages of medication. Unfortunately, painkillers were not the option for them, for they became intoxicated if they took too much, so Eryn’s medication had been custom concocted.

No one wanted an embarrassing repeat of what happened to Jake when he accidentally overdosed on a few painkillers and smashed up half of the lab they had been resting and recovering in. It had taken both her and Eryn to lash him down to one of the tables, though for both of them in their new, enhanced bodies, it had been painful and hard. So Dr. Reinhart had forbid them from painkillers, though Eryn did try to get drunk once on some heavy liquor…which didn’t work at all. Still, she preferred to be sober, though she did slightly envy how the regular troopers, even the ODSTs could easily wash away their sorrows over a bottle.

“I’m glad that you’re alive, dad,” she said. “Sorry that I couldn’t contact you in the years that I’ve been stationed here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Chief Mendez replied, blowing out a smoke ring. “I’m just sorry that I didn’t get to see you grow up.”

They walked on the rapidly rising, rocky terrain in amicable silence for a few minutes before she said, “Mom’s blade broke during a mission when I rammed and sliced up into an Elite.”

“At least the Elite got some gut full of grade-A Corsica carbide,” her father replied, prompting her to crack a small smile. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t have my blade to give to you. I had an excellent student during the time I trained the two-point-zeroes and gave him my blade…I never got a chance to spar with Spartan-one-zero-four after he and the others got augmented, but I think its for the better.”

“Actually,” she said, bending down a bit to unsheathe the blade that was strapped to her boot and held it up, “he gave me your blade after mom’s got broken.” She had expected surprise to glance across her father’s features, but his face remained quite neutral as he took the blade from her hand and examined it as if it were a completely foreign object. “Dad?” she prompted after a few minutes of silence.

“Did your mother ever tell you the traditions of blade gifting before you left?”

She shook her head, “No…what’s wrong?”

“Colony traditions indicate that each person’s blade is like their soul, and imparting their own custom blade to a friend, student, or family member is similar to imparting a sense of high respect and honor in the ancient hierarchy that used to govern the colony. Your mother was an incredible blade fighter, and she made it look like art…but I think she saw it in you too, which is why she gave you her blade. I saw the potential in all the two-point-zeroes, but it was Spartan-one-zero-four that stood out from the rest. Not that I don’t doubt your abilities, but I think that the two of you might just be on equal terms in combat blade fighting…”

She kept the surprise from her face, for it was very rare to hear her father say anything quite as philosophical as this, for she was used to his short, severe way of saying things. She also couldn’t help but feel a bit embarrassed for the first time in a very long time…compliments were far and few in between, and she didn’t really like them. It made her uncomfortable, but she pushed the feeling away and said, “I still have mom’s blade…do you want me to return the blade?”

He was silent for a few long minutes before passing the blade back to her, saying, “Keep it for now. It seems like it was given in the spirit of a gifted blade, though I highly doubt that Spartan-one-zero-four knows about the implications. We’ve all been though hell and back…the two-point-zeroes…they keep to themselves, but if we’re going to survive, it will be like what Commander Ambrose said to me: ‘we have be more of a family than a team’.”

“Thanks,” she quietly said. “I think that was our first father-daughter advice giving session.”

“Damn straight it is,” he muttered, taking another puff out of the cigar before blowing another smoke ring. “Don’t bring the boys home without letting me know and I won’t have to gut them with that blade.”

Slightly puzzled, she shook her head a bit and shrugged, to which her father murmured, “Nevermind. At least I don’t have to try to break the Marines’ jaws.”

“I guarantee you that if you have an Oddball session with just the Marines, they’ll give the training that you gave us at Boot a good run,” she suggested.

“Not what I meant, Leigh,” her father replied. “But you know…if we’re permanently stuck on this rock, then a session of real, honest-to-God Oddball does sound good… Now…how are we going to get everyone up the cliff?”

“Simple,” she replied, “Those that can, will carry the scientists or the pods up.”

 

~*~*~*~


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

1335 hours, November 11, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

“You keep standing there, the egg’s not going to cook any faster,” Dr. Reinhart muttered as he rapidly typed away at a laptop that was swirling with several Forerunner symbols. Surrounding him were the other remaining scientists: Dr. Miranda Yelchin, bio-engineer; Dr. Tian Solev, linguist; Dr. Katerina Mosely, technologist, and the only assistant to have escaped the destruction of Zone 67, Neil Rousseau. Dr. Halsey was also busy with her laptop and the mote-of-light micro-AI, Jerrod seemed to be winking quite fast, though the sunlight was contributing to the slight optical illusion.

Leigh merely said nothing except to back off a bit as the sounds of fire-rapid typing seemed to increase a bit in volume. While her rifle was in a light grip in her hands, she still didn’t like the fact that this particular area had almost no cover on the front-sun-facing side. The structure was tall and spindly, with at least three sections that were in a vague shape of a mountain top. She estimated the height of the old, moss-covered structure to be at least 20 meters tall from the area where they had set up camp. However, she had a feeling that the structure was taller than that, for the near-shear cliff face they had to climb just a couple of days ago was at least 300 meters, if not more. The length of the visible part of the structure was more than a hundred meters.

Ever since her patrol shift had ended a little over six hours ago, she had been standing near the scientists, hoping that they would crack into the structure soon. After they had gotten settled, the scientists had unanimously agreed on the fact that the structure was most definitely not a way out of the Shield World. She had seen the spark of hope die on the Marines’ eyes, but their curiosity as to what exactly they had all stumbled upon was still piqued.

In the few days that had passed since those who had survive the Sentinel attack on Camp Currahee had met up with the small Section Zero team survivors, Leigh had seen quite a bit of change in the dynamics between the Spartans and the Marines. Though her Marines were still quite chatty as usual, it seemed that the normally quiet, reserved, and introverted Spartans had some of their shell chipped away, though she could see that the Beta and Gamma Company Spartans were still haunted by the violent deaths of their comrades. However, they seemed just a tiny bit more relaxed now than they had been when they had first arrived, but she could also see them getting a bit restless. She had seen Dr. Halsey take a few of the Spartans aside at times and teach them a couple of games, including Twenty Questions, though she left them alone to play the games themselves to return to deciphering the Forerunner structure. She had also seen them rope in Chief Mendez into the games, and a couple of the Marines had started their own variant, though it was a bit more coarse in nature than what the Spartans were thinking up for.

She had also taken a bit of her free time that was not spent trying to find an alternate way in, to get to know the Spartans a bit better, though she deigned to participate in their word games. Those Spartans she now knew better than the rest were Kelly, Tom, and Lucy, though she frequently took over Linda’s shift that involved a rather long climb up to one of the tiers in the structure. That had gotten the three Gamma Company Spartans into a small competition to see who could scale the structure to the top the fastest. When the Gamma Company Spartans were not trying to break their own bones, they seemed to sit around with the Marines more often than usual. Jake had told her that they found the Marines and their ‘adventurous’ operations spanning the start of the Human-Covenant war until now, much more fascinating. She had spoken to Dr. Yelchin briefly about Lucy’s psychological muteness, but even the normally ice-cold doctor said that there was nothing she could do about it and actually sympathized with what Lucy had been through.

As for her partner in her sniper-spotter pair, during their shared shift and even when they were not on shift, they didn’t even speak much and let silence settle over them. It was not to say she didn’t know anything about Fred even after reading up all the SPARTAN-IIs dossiers during the early days of the Human-Covenant War. She just merely observed his actions when they weren’t on shift duty. It seemed that Commander Ambrose’s sudden and unexpected promotion of him from NCO to officer had shaken him a bit, though she could see that he was starting to focus on the bigger picture than merely on the immediate concern of his team. She had already seen his actions in the four prior missions she and her strike team had participated in about thirteen to fourteen years ago and felt that he was a strong leader. Even if the Section Zero expedition survivors had not chanced upon meeting the Spartans, she was sure that they would survive just fine with him as their leader.

This was why she decided to share joint command with him instead of pulling rank and taking command over all military forces. She had neither the full trust of the Spartans under her and she wanted to leave the option open of the possibility that he could easily deploy his team elsewhere while she took the expedition team in another direction. For now, their goals were the same, but she still felt that the four missions she had with the prior make-up of Blue Team was enough mingling between Section Zero and Section Three. It didn’t matter if Dr. Reinhart had been Dr. Halsey’s mentor prior to her rapid ascension within Section Three, there were bound to be philosophical and ideological differences between the scientists, which would most likely divide the military forces.

It was the worst-case scenario she wanted to avoid, but she knew that it was also quite possible for it to happen. But her Marines and the Spartans were all trained for combat, for war, not for politics. However, that did not mean she and Jake were not politically minded, for most of the missions they carried out were quite political in nature against the Covenant and against the Insurrectionists. The rest followed their orders when given, though if they had any objections, she knew at least her Marines would voice their opinions. The Spartans were like a black-box to her when it came to orders, but from what Section Two put out on their propaganda machine and from what she had read and learned in all the years as an ONI officer, the Covenant were the main threat, even though the Spartans had been created to counter Insurrectionists. And they took the impossible orders to make everything else possible.

“Leigh,” Dr. Reinhart said, a bit exasperated, “we’re not going to crack this in the next few hours. Stop waiting there. Shoo and go do something else…go see if Jake’s finished with his sets of translations or something.” The doctor glanced up and his eyes rolled slightly a bit and he shook his head as Leigh heard the near-silent approach of one of the Spartans, causing the doctor to add on, “No, Lieutenant…we’re not done yet. Go away. Both of you…just go away…you’re not helping.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, frowning just a tiny bit at the slightly angry dismissal as she turned away and walked to the cliff’s edge that was directly ahead of the entrance. She was certain that the doctor had slept at least sixteen hours in the past few days combined, but had a hunch that something was bothering the old doctor. It was none of her concern, but she needed the scientists to be at their peak. She wondered if it was because of the arrival of Dr. Halsey that had cause the doctor to be somewhat irrationally irritated whenever talking to her or to Jake.

However, before Leigh got even half-way to the cliff’s edge where Jake was sitting facing the sun with a laptop perched somewhat precariously near the edge and a datapad in his hands, she heard one of the scientists shout, “Eureka!”

Spinning around, she fell in behind as the long, powerful steps of SPARTAN-104 cross the distance to where the scientists were. But even the speed of a SPARTAN-II was not fast enough to reach the scientists as the entrance portal contracted and slid open in a triangular, segmented fashion. Beyond the dark, semi-circular maw was nothing, and nothing seemed to come out even as the others Spartans and Marines, alerted to the opening, skidded or slid to a stop. All of them had weapons pointed unwaveringly at the portal and Leigh clicked through to BROADCOM.

“India and Foxtrot, stay here. Lima, November, and Chief Mendez, guard the egg-heads. Spartans, move in. If anything moves that’s not human, shoot first, ask later.”

A brilliant cascade of green acknowledgement lights winked across her HUD as the group moved into action. Both Fred and Kelly were the first to cross the threshold, and she followed the two, with Jake falling closely behind her. It was incredibly dark, but her vision quickly adjusted to the harsh light spilling in from behind, and she could see the faint outline of an angular, room. Headlamps flickered on and panned all across the room as the two Spartans took the left and right route while she and Jake took the center, with the rest falling in behind.

There seemed to be no enemy contacts on her tracker as she continued forward except for the slightly golden glow of allies, but suddenly, she heard a yelp from Jake across TEAMCOM who was a couple of meters ahead. She saw him flail a bit and rushed towards him as he fell beyond the curved edge of something in the center of the room. Throwing herself flat on the ramp up to the lip of the hole, she reached for him and roughly caught him by one of his hands as he smacked into the hole’s wall.

“I found a hole,” he quipped over TEAMCOM.

“The hole found you,” Kelly retorted over TEAMCOM.

Leigh merely rolled her eyes inside her helmet as she heard the chuckles come from her Marines and couple of the Gamma Company Spartans and dragged him back up the slippery purchase, hearing the oddly muffled footsteps of a couple of Spartans approaching. They shined their lamplights down into the hole that Jake had vacated, and she noticed that the Spartans had formed a scattered circle around the lip of the hole, which was most likely nine to ten meters in diameter. The scientists were near the outer edges of the place, but were not much than a half-meter away from any of the Spartans or Marines.

“Linda, how deep does this go?” Fred said over TEAMCOM.

Instead of answering right away, Linda merely aimed her sniper rifle as perpendicular as possible and after a moment, said, “Ten meters, though I’m not too sure if it’s because of another structure jutting out or if its truly the bottom of the shaft, sir.”

“Chief, chuck a flare in please,” Leigh ordered. They only had two flares, courtesy of one of the Marines who happened to have those two with him when they had been transported by the Monitor to this place.

“Yes, ma’am,” Chief Mendez replied, stepping forward and activating a flare, temporarily blinding everyone until he dropped it in. Everyone seemed to observe the unusually slow descent of the flare and when it finally hit what looked like solid ground, it stayed, burning quite merrily.

“Sir, ma’am, I’ll jump first,” Kelly volunteered.

Leigh merely tilted her head up a bit, and Fred answered over TEAMCOM, “Go.”

Instead of leaping straight off the edge, Kelly backed away and ran up to the edge, jumping so that she was falling near the center of the hole. Similar to the flare, she was descending at a slower rate than what was expected, and landed incredibly lightly on the floor. However, her voice was a bit distorted when it came through BROADCOM and she said, “It’s solid down here, and I think there’s a panel here. Can’t read the writing on it, but I think either Doctor Halsey or Doctor Solev can make heads or tails out of it.”

“The ropes won’t have enough length if we attach them to the outside of the place and bring them down to here, sir,” Ash said over TEAMCOM. “But we can hold them while others rappel down.”

“Tom, Lucy, take the doctors with you,” Fred ordered.

The two Beta Company Spartans nodded and as soon as the scientists were secured did they start their careful descent, though it was a bit hard for both Tom and Lucy to find purchase on the slippery wall. Gamma Company and a few of the Marines were holding onto the ropes with Linda assisting. Fred was standing on the far side of the room, his rifle pointed down into the semi-dark hole, but was looking around the edges, for what, she couldn’t guess.

“There’s no oil film of any kind that I can see,” Tom muttered over TEAMCOM. “Why is this wall so slippery?”

“Jake, let me see your datapad,” Leigh said, turning from her observation of the two Spartans with their scientists clutching tight on their backs. “I want to try something.”

Her friend handed over the pad and she secured it to her waist and instead of taking a flying leap similar to Kelly, she went to the edge of the hole and jumped straight down. Her descent took less than a second and the ten-meter impact force jarred her quite a bit that she couldn’t help but grunt a bit.

“Ma’am?” Kelly’s voice came over TEAMCOM, no longer distorted as she walked over to where she was still half-crouched from the impact.

She waved the ‘I’m fine’ signal and heard over TEAMCOM, the distorted voice of Jake, “Well, there’s definitely a gravity gradient shift, Leigh. You dropped faster than a stone…probably as fast as an ODST pod through atmo. And it looks like the light down there got a smidge brighter, though I’m not sure where the source is coming from.”

“There’s also a time distortion field,” she answered, looking around, as she recovered and followed Kelly to where she gestured for the odd panel on the metallic-looking stand near the center of the solid ground. There were symbols on both the pad and all over the ground, which seemed to have a faint, barely discernable glow, all foreign to her eyes, and the odd muffle of a half-ton of MJOLNIR stomping through the place was still present, even in this strange area. “I hear Kelly just fine, but you’re all coming in as if we’re almost light-years away. Tom and Lucy are also descending quite slowly compared to what I saw up there.”

Pulling out her datapad, she brought up the translations that Jake had been working on, but nothing matched what she could see. As she scrolled through the translations, Kelly took a peek at the datapad and she shifted so the Spartan could see what she was reading. “It looks like a bunch of gibberish in Latin,” Kelly said over a private channel.

Leigh shrugged and put away the datapad and keyed BROADCOM, asking, “Any other corridors or is this the only chamber?”

“No others,” Jake replied. “Nothing on the walls and I don’t think any of us will be able to scale it either. One of the Marines’ blades broke when she tried to chip the wall. Standby.”

“Leigh, Spartan-zero-five-eight,” Dr. Reinhart’s voice came through BROADCOM, a tiny bit strained, “We’re encountering a heavy gravity gradient up here on descent. Get ready to catch.”

Both Leigh and Kelly hurried to the other side of the floor where Tom and Lucy were descending and not seconds later did the two Beta Company Spartans drop the last five meters. Dr. Halsey and Dr. Solev were neatly caught while Leigh observed that the rate of fall for the two Spartans was the same as normal gravity. Their impact noises however, were muffled, though she did hear a grunt from Tom while Lucy mere shook her head to clear it. The floor seemed to glow just a bit brighter when the two Spartans and scientists landed.

“Got them,” Kelly said over BROADCOM as the two of them set the scientists onto the floor, with Dr. Halsey brushing herself off a bit before she and Dr. Solev made their way towards the center of the platform.

The two doctors made short work of translating the symbols as their laptops swirled with the strange symbols and the mote-of-light AI was busy trying to process the information. After a few minutes, Dr. Halsey looked up and said to the four Spartans, “As best as we can translate it, it says ‘Gather all to return and reclaim.’”

“Reclaim?” Tom asked, “As in Reclaimers? The same thing that that Sentinel said to Ash?”

“Possibly,” Dr. Solev said his accent quite thick, almost drowning out his words. “Though the symbols on the floor may hold other meanings that could shed light to the words.”

“Anything else? What about the gravity gradient or the fact that we’re having some time-lag in communication down here versus up there?” Leigh asked.

“No,” Dr. Halsey replied, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose a bit, “Though if I extrapolate what I’ve deciphered on Onyx versus what we’ve found so far in the Shield World, then the build of this may be similar to a transport ring of some sort, except designed to hold Forerunners en masse. I’d suggest pulling everyone here and seeing if it will transport us anywhere, perhaps deeper in, Lieutenant.”

Leigh saw Dr. Solev nod in agreement and though she was wary of the possibility that there was no way back up the ten meters, she had noticed that with the presence of six people now on the floor, the symbols all over the floor were glowing just a tad bit brighter for her not to dismiss it as the flare’s glow. She keyed TEAMCOM and said, “Fred, bring your group down here and the pods too. Jake, get India and Foxtrot and bring the Marines into this place. Rappel the rest of the scientists and Marines down here and we’ll catch them. Doctors Halsey and Solev think that this thing is a transporter and will activate once we’re all on it.”

“Wilco,” she heard Jake say over the COM while she received a green light of acknowledgement through her HUD, which oddly enough, did not lag unlike COM. She found that strangely odd but didn’t ponder it.

It took only a few minutes to get everyone on the pad and once the last of them dropped to the platform, the glow from the platform got blindingly bright before shrouding them in darkness. Leigh felt a tug near her naval that almost became a dropping feeling of weightlessness for a brief second before nausea washed over her. But as suddenly as it came it was over and they were dropped into a dimly lit chamber. She heard a few of the Marines vomit into the helmets, but none of them dared to take it off, not while they were in an unknown place.

“Air is Earth norm,” Dr. Reinhart said as Fred gestured for the Spartans to fan out of this enormous chamber that was full of walls and barriers that looked sort of like consoles. Leigh gestured for her Marines to fan out in the opposite direction while she headed towards the center; a ring of console-looking things stood there, and there was a globe, with Dr. Reinhart and Dr. Halsey following close behind.

“Facinating, absolutely fascinating,” she heard Dr. Reinhart murmur as the two scientists approached the console and Dr. Halsey placed her hand on the globe. Bright blue illumination instantly flowed around her hand and spread outwards, encompassing the globe.

“Doctor…” Leigh started, then trailed off as the chamber’s unusual glow increased and illuminated everything around them. Before the three of them was a fairly large, spherical holographic projection with multiple dots and shades of blue and green, along with a smaller, yellow sphere within the bigger projection. The floor all around this chamber was a dark amber glass-like structure, though it was a bit hard to see what was beyond the glass, for there were numerous faintly glowing symbols covering the glass.

Dr. Halsey held her laptop close to the spherical globe that had activated this unexpected thing and the mote-of-light AI jumped from the laptop and into the globe, seemingly disappearing before Leigh heard a crackle over her speakers as Jerrod said, “Curious that there’s so much memory space for such a construct and that I was able to jump so easily. I do not even think that even an AI of the highest caliber can fill the entire space.”

“Jerrod, is this a map of the Shield World?” Dr. Halsey asked.

“Yes,” the AI replied. A red winking circle around one of the many dots appeared over the projection. “According to the leftover processors and memories left by the last construct to inhabit this place, all these other dots are structures similar to this one. However, even with this much memory to expand my capabilities and processing powers, it will take me some time to translate all these archives left behind. Might I suggest that we continue to explore this place…I shall notify all teams if there are any immediate areas of concern.”

“Please also try to find out if this place has an exit portal out of the Shield World or if conditions for entrance and exit to what Catherine and her team encountered above Onyx can be replicated,” Dr. Reinhart said.

There was just the briefest moment of pauses where the mote-of-light AI waited until a barely perceptible nod of confirmation from Dr. Halsey came before saying, “Certainly, Doctor.” It was just small enough that the rest of the science team approaching them didn’t seem to catch the hesitation, but Leigh had seen it.

“We might have future trouble with the AI,” Jake whispered to her in an encrypted single-beam direct COM burst.

Leigh said nothing in return and only gestured for her team to move out, while Blue Team did the same. She left four Marines with the scientists while Tom and Lucy stayed behind, but she gestured for Chief Mendez to come with her team as they headed out. Keying TEAMCOM, she said, “Meet you back here in twenty.” Green acknowledgement lights winked on the upper part of her HUD and she gripped her rifle a bit tighter as her team approached the far side of the chamber where the symbol on what looked like a door glowed blue, ready to let explorers through.

 

* * *

 

0800 hours, November 15, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Undetermined location within Forerunner construct known as Shield World

 

Fred walked through the oddly muted corridors, secured by Blue Team and the Marines, though he still held his rifle in a semi-tight grip in his hands. The corridors were clear, but he couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy, even after Dr. Halsey and the micro-AI Jerrod had reassured all of them that there were no detectable synthetic life forms anywhere near the perimeter they had established. However, the only good thing to have come out so far in the past four days they had been transported into this place was the fact that the scientists had determined that the structure was a ship.

That was very promising, though if they only knew how to power it up.

Never mind that none of them currently knew next-to-nothing about how to operate a Forerunner ship, but a way to actually escape this Shield World and possibly bring back a relic to Earth would have enormous benefits. He knew that it would severely weaken the morale of the Covenant and give Earth a highly sought-after tactical advantage.

As he approached a set of doors, it quietly slid open and he entered to find Jake sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop in front of him at one of the small chamber’s many consoles. He was busy typing away at translations. What could pass for glass was at the forefront of the chamber, though it was quite dark and Fred couldn’t tell if it was because of the dirt that buried the ship or there were blast panels. The illumination in this room was relatively the same, but that was only because Leigh was near the center, holding her ungloved hand on a smaller version of the strange globe that had activated the projection of the Shield World. However, instead of the Shield World, this smaller globe was projecting a star field that was slowly rotating around her.

“I think it’s a map of the galaxy,” she said, continuing to occasionally look at her datapad in the other ungloved hand and the projection.

Fred remained silent and heard Jake say, “Still not accepting forced coordinates. Maybe this thing has to be powered on and moving for it to take it?”

“Or maybe because of the Slipspace field, this thing says we don’t exist,” Leigh replied, shrugging a bit. “Any ideas, Fred?”

He shook his head, not too sure why she had asked him when she knew that he had not much of an idea as to why the navigational console was not accepting coordinates. At least he thought it was a nav console, though it looked like it was linked to the projected star map, because the activated globe seemed to glow a bit brighter whenever Jake hit the enter key on the laptop. There were too many unknowns on this ship and that added to his unease.

The chamber suddenly buckled and a loud rumbling was clearly heard, even without his helmet’s external noise filter on. One of the scientists voice crackled over BROADCOM, saying, “I think we’ve just activated propulsions…” More rumbles and the horrible sound of creaking and snapping metal drowned out the scientists words, shaking enough to cause him ride out the rough ride kneeled.

Leigh had lost her grip on the globe and tumbled backwards but regained her footing while Jake had grabbed the console he was working at for extra support. As the violent shaking increased, Fred could see out of the amber viewport that there were shifts in the dirt that encased the ship; subtle but tiny shifts that indicated that the propulsive system in the Forerunner ship was winning against eons of encasement in earth. The fierce quaking lasted a few more minutes before Fred could definitely start to see more of the earth start to slip away as the ship ascended from its grave.

“…worse than that quake on Arcadia back in twenty,” he barely heard one of the Marines quip over BROADCOM as the awful sounds of metal bending in what he could imagine as impossible configurations subsided and light started to pour through the viewports as the ship rapidly rose to freedom. How the ship was holding together was beyond him.

“Doctor, whatever you did, all stop to propulsion, we’re getting too high!” he heard Leigh shout over BROADCOM.

“Can’t!” Dr. Mosely’s voice came back over, scratchy and garbled. “Jerrod—connectors—overrides—not working.” Half of the message was cut off by static as the ship continued to rise and brilliantly bright sunlight spilled over the amber viewports that were trying to tint as best as they could, but the gist of the message was understood. Fred’s visor automatically polarized to maximum, but he still had to look away from staring directly into the ball of fiery gas. At the rate they were ascending, he knew that they should have felt at least 9g’s but everything around him felt like normal gravity as he regained his balance and stood up. He wasted no time and hooked his rifle onto his back, crossing the deck to stare out of the window as the sun started to fall behind, while Leigh activated the small star chart again and Jake started to re-calculate coordinates.

“Brace for impact!” he said over BROADCOM and placed his hands on the unknown console in front of him.

“Still not accepting coord--” Jake started but was cut of as the ship violently impacted the other side of the Shield World, throwing them to the deck again.

Instead of stopping dead, the Forerunner ship continued to plow through the earth, once again, plunging them into a series of violent shakes and shudders. Just what alloys was the ship made out of, Fred briefly wondered as earth covered the viewports once again. He had had a tight grip on the console, but when he was knocked to the ground, there was not even a dent in the console from the force he had applied to the console to stop his fall.

“Lieutenant—headed—Slipspace—other--” the garbled voice of Dr. Halsey was barely heard by him as the bending metallic acoustics pinged throughout the ship.

Fred staggered up, putting most of his weight on the consoles and slowly stumbled over to where the other two Spartans were. Jake was furiously trying to input coordinates into the jostling laptop while Leigh was trying to regain her footing, using the globe as a brace. But just as the shuddering and shaking could get any worse, it suddenly stopped and he turned from trying to help them up and saw the inky darkness of space.

Staring straight back through the viewports that had shifted from amber to clear were trillions of tiny blazing red spheres, arranged in a lattice of three-meter long rods, connected by a half-meter spherical center that was starting to shift into an orange color. The Sentinels of Onyx blanketed the entire view and they were starting to move—

“Coordinates are no go!” Jake cried over BROADCOM.

Fred though he heard Leigh mutter a choice curse over the COM but he wasn’t too sure, for he saw out of the corner of his eyes, her other hand pass through the star chart and one of the stars glowed ever so briefly. Just as he felt multiple impact shudder through the ship as the Sentinels fired their weapons at them, he felt himself being jerked backwards. He crashed into the forward console with enough impact to cause him to see stars as his head smashed against the inside of his helmet. Jake was lucky for he only skidded across the floor, but Leigh had tumbled and smashed into another console on the far side of the chamber with enough force to knock her out cold.

He shook his head to clear it and stood up, seeing the curt nod from Jake as he indicated that he would take care of Leigh. He usually did not have hunches like Kurt had, but those impact forces he had felt before being thrown about seemed to be greater than what he knew the force Sentinel beam weaponry could produce. Opening TEAMCOM, he said, “Blue Team, on me. Secure all corridors and prep for possible Sentinel forces.” He frowned as he saw several green winks of acknowledgement across his HUD but two did not show up. Olivia and Tom had not sent their acknowledgements.

“Olivia and Tom are out cold, sir,” Kelly’s voice came through his speakers. “We’re taking them to the holo-chamber.”

“I’ll join you guys as soon as I get Leigh there,” Jake’s voice crackled over TEAMCOM. “The Marines will stay to guard the rest.”

He merely winked a double green flash for acknowledgement, unhooked his rifle and swiftly walked out of the chamber.

 

~*~*~*~


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1145 hours, November 15, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, uncharted system.

 

The sounds of Debussy floated across her ears as she awoke and snapped her eyes open to find an unfamiliar, stark blue-grey ceiling staring back at her. She quickly sat up only to feel a wash of prickly pain cascade throughout her body as her skin rubbed against her body suit. Shunting the pain of the side effects from her long-ago augmentations aside, she looked around and found that only Dr. Yelchin and Dr. Halsey were standing around the holo-chamber.

“Finally awake,” Dr. Yelchin stated, looking up from her laptop when Leigh tried to stand. “The three of you managed to induce a hairline fracture in all of your skulls. There was no damage and only dermal applications were needed to fix it. The Spartans managed to find and destroy two Sentinels that got on board. A rota has been started to keep the corridors clear.”

“Three of us?” she asked, getting up and taking her helmet with her. Taking a quick look inside, she noted that the back had been repaired again by Dr. Mosely and made a small note in the back of her mind to thank the doctor later.

“Olivia and Tom hit the walls with almost as much force as you did, Lieutenant,” Dr. Halsey stated. “It seemed that only this chamber out of all the corridors did not feel the effects of the Slipspace jump you’ve induced.”

“Any idea where we are, Doctors?” she asked as she walked over to the holo-sphere that was projecting a system that contained three planets that in the old days, would have been classified as hot-Jupiters, orbiting binary stars. Somehow, whatever she did just as she touched the smaller globe in what she mentally dubbed as “the bridge”, it had jumped them to another system. But not fast enough to completely evade the impacts of Sentinels trying to get onto the ship. However, she suspected that there were probably more than two Sentinels roaming around.

“No. You’re better off trying to ask Anton or Tian,” Dr. Yelchin dismissively said.

It was her cue to leave and she gave a nod to both doctors and donned her helmet. BROADCOM was filled with chatter from the scientists and she surmised that they were gathered around the bridge area, trying to decipher the consoles. Gathering what little she briefly heard, it seemed that the propulsive system had shut down upon their exit into the system and they had been drifting in a stable orbit since then.

“Jerrod, what’s the time?” she queried over a direct beam to the AI.

“Eleven hundred hours and forty-five minutes, Lieutenant Hattersfield,” the AI replied back in a slightly condescending British accent. “It’s been nearly three-and-a-half hours since we’ve left the Zeta Doradus system. I have not seen an elapse in time versus the Slipspace jump in any of the connections I have made so far to the ship’s systems. It was near instantaneous, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” she said and switched to TEAMCOM. “Blue Leader, status and location.”

“We’ve secured all corridors three levels below the holo-chamber. Two Sentinels made it up to this level, both have been destroyed. No contacts for an hour now. Lieutenant Creighton is currently exploring one of the level’s corridors that were unsealed by Jerrod a half-hour ago. Blue-two,-six, -seven, and India are with him.”

“Copy,” she stated. That mean that Kelly, Ash, Olivia, and the two Marines, Taryn and Yegor, were with him. Turning back to the direct beam to the AI, she asked, “Jerrod, ship and crew status from the minute that we plowed through Onyx until I woke up.”

“As you wish, ma’am,” the AI said and began debriefing her.

 

A derelict ship was the least likely place Kelly would have thought that she and her fellow Spartans would get stuck on, but it seemed that anything was possible now. From being stuck in a world which they had only jumped into out of desperation to plowing through space in an ancient ship in which they knew little about, she considered all of them lucky to have survived thus far. Somewhere out there, perhaps John’s luck rubbed off a bit on them.

So far, there was absolutely nothing jumping out from the sealed corridors attached to this main one opened up by Jerrod. The doors were still marked red and had not even winked blue. That was how the other two Sentinels had gotten in, through supposedly sealed corridors. Right now, there was absolutely no motion on her tracker and no visual signs of any more Sentinels; the corridor was clear.

She winked the all clear signal and moments later, heard the muted echoes of jogging feet catching up to her position. Everything about this ship made her uneasy, from the muted footsteps to the fact that corridors were opening and overriding the lockdown that Jerrod said that he had established. The only two who didn’t seemed spooked out were Jake and Leigh and she sometimes wondered if they knew something about the ship that they weren’t letting on. However, it didn’t make any sense to her, but it was just slightly more reassuring that at least not all of them were freaked out. Still, she liked the mystery they were uncovering, albeit she was not fond of the fact that the Sentinels had infiltrated the ship, even if it was a Forerunner ship.

The door at the end of this long corridor was marked red, but it suddenly winked to blue and she snapped her rifle up. “I’ve unlocked the chamber ahead,” the AI’s voice filtered through the COM. “I believe that the ships logs have called this chamber a bio-stasis room.”

She saw the hand motion of Jake wave them forward as he took point and the door slid quietly open when they approached it. In the dimly lit chamber was a series of long rows of consoles and what looked to be tables, but absolutely nothing was jumping out at them and firing their lasers. She heard nothing over her external speakers, even when she boosted the aural sensors to maximum. Her tracker also showed nothing as she entered and scoped out the room.

Disappointment filled her as she and the small scouting team entered the room, and it got brighter as it registered their presences. She had been initially disturbed by this, for all the chambers seemed to wax and wane light whenever they traversed the ship’s corridors. It was as if this ship was half-organic and had unknown motion sensors.

However, her disappointment was instantly replaced by curiosity from several things that lined the wall of this chamber that had caught her eye. She crossed the distance in three long steps and reached out with a hand to brush the metallic-looking indent that was similarly carved to the shape of the Slipspace pods—“Sir, recommend bringing Team Katana down here. I think these were meant to hold the Slipspace pods.”

Jake immediately came over and after a quick assessment he said, “Agreed. Maybe this will help the scientists crack those pods.”

She nodded curtly and hurried to the entrance to the chamber as Jake relayed the suggestion through BROADCOM. If Ash and his team was a solid unit, though still green Spartans, then she was eager to see how Team Katana would perform. Though the scientists had agreed that they had somehow punched through the Slipspace field that had contained the Shield World that had not helped them solve the mystery of how to crack the Slipspace pods. Dr. Reinhart had also explicitly stated a bunker for the ‘Reclaimers’ always had to have something for them to get out of and ‘reclaim’ what they had lost. It had been followed by a series of theoretical arguments with the other scientists that had been total gibberish to her. She had ignored them after the strange doctor’s statement.

She passed by the two Marines who were examining something strange on one of the long console-tables and overheard their whispers:

“Oh God, is that what I think it is?” Taryn asked, horrified as she nudged the solid grey mass sitting on the smooth table-like surface with the tip of her rifle.

“Ancient Forerunner food cube? Sure,” Yegor said, eyeing the mass with great distaste. “Who knows what it might have been back in those days. Broccoli?” He keyed TEAMCOM and said, “Sirs and ma’am, I think we just found some ancient food that hasn’t rotted yet. I would not recommend consuming it.”

She quietly snorted in laughter at the comment, and saw the two Gamma Company Spartans, Ash and Olivia, examining another solid grey mass further into the chamber. As she neared the entrance to the chamber, it slid quietly open and her world suddenly turned into blinding white light.

 

Jake’s faceplate automatically polarized to half-max as the distorted beam weaponry from the Sentinel fired before the door fully opened, melting at least half of the door, and saw the glancing blow it dealt to Kelly. It was still enough that he saw the golden flare of her shields overload and fail as she tried to dodge the attack. “Enemy contact!” he yelled over TEAMCOM. As he adjusted the polarity of his faceplate, he fired a few rounds from his rifle, as did the rest of his team, attracting the attention of the mated-paired Sentinel from advancing towards Kelly. She scrambled up and with a flying leap, she rammed straight into the Sentinel-pair, sending it tumbling into the hardened ceiling. Its shields rippled and died, and he fired another quick burst, as the rest also unloaded a furious storm of ammo at the Sentinel-pair before its shields recovered.

However, before any of them could react, instead of firing its beam, an ear-piercing tone blasted through their COM networks, causing Jake to shut down his speakers. That didn’t work, as the mind-boring sound drilled into him, as if coming from his own mind. Just as suddenly it had come, it stopped and this time, Jake’s helmet polarized to maximum as the Sentinel-pair self-detonated.

The ringing in his ears wouldn’t stop and the smoke was not clearing as they were pelted by shards of metal and dying embers of fire from the wreckage. He flashed his message by light through their HUDs, saying: _Secure the corridor_.

Green winks of acknowledgement followed his orders and they fanned out, examining one of the doors that had been marked red before and was now blue. It opened to reveal a smaller corridor connected to several other unknown corridors. He winked amber to his team and just as the ringing in his ears was starting to subside a bit, he saw others running down the main corridor.

They must have said something over COM, but he couldn’t hear it, and winked his message to them: _Can’t hear you. Self destructed after blasting a noise over COM_.

The Morse-code message he and the others on his team got back from Fred was: _Noise has triggered incoming forces_. The Spartan also waved the ‘fall back’ hand signal.

He and his team winked their acknowledgement and they hurried back up to the furthest point they had secured on the ship as Jerrod locked the doors to the corridors behind them. Incoming forces meant that the Sentinels had tracked them down all the way from Onyx and while his mind still partially reeled in the near-impossibility of that feat, it was after all, Forerunner technology they were dealing with. Anything was possible, and that meant that they had to hold their ground if more Sentinels got through and inside the ship.

 

“I think we’ve got propulsive systems working again,” the lone expedition assistant, Neil Rousseau said as his voice crackled a bit over BROADCOM. The scientists had vacated the bridge on Leigh’s orders as soon as the blast of extremely painful noise from the Sentinel that had made contact with Jake and his team had come through all frequencies of the COM.

She had tried to contact Jake and his team afterwards, but they had not responded. Then the status of their hearing loss came from Fred and she ordered them to fall back. She didn’t know what that noise was, but she had a good guess that it was a signal for either other Sentinels on the ship or perhaps a long-ranged frequency burst to the Sentinels back on Onyx. Her mind didn’t even reel at the fact that long-range frequency bursts could travel that far and that fast, but her confirmation was justified as she saw out of the clear view ports on the bridge, the silhouettes of multiple golden-glowing dots filled the place. The three enormous lattice structures that most of them had arranged themselves into had at least ten concentrated clusters that were starting to shift into an orange color. Several smaller structures were seen as the binary star burned brightly behind them.

She ungloved her hands and placed one on the small blue globe. None of the star charts they had on file matched what was stored in the Forerunner ship, and attempts to triangulate where they were in correlation to the known star charts had been unsuccessful. As the star map sprang up and swirled around her, she reached out with her other hand and touched one of the many stars.

Nothing happened…

“It needs blood,” the excited voice of Dr. Solev came over BROADCOM just as the ship shuddered with multiple impacts from the beams of the Sentinels as they flared red and fired. “Oh…what’s this…” she barely heard his curious whisper, just as two bright blue lances of beams lashed out from the _ship_ , causing the Sentinels to scatter.

Taking no more chances, she partially lifted up her mother’s broken blade sheathed at her waist and ran a couple of fingertips over the still-sharp blade. Even with the accidental discovery of what she hoped was the weapons system of this ship, it was not logical to stay and try to fight using an unknown ship or system – they had to run. As her fingers welled up with blood, she shouted over TEAMCOM, “Brace for jump!”

The bloodied fingers touched a star on the map swirling around her. Instead of the jerk that felt like someone had pulled a one-two punch straight through her stomach and into her spine like last time, this time there was a noticeable shudder and a tug near her abdomen that cause her to fall backwards. However, she did not miss the fact that the droplets of blood had not fallen through the holographic star map and had instead, been _absorbed_ into the holograph.

The shudder immediately stopped and she scrambled up as the star map died away and the harsh light tinted slightly amber from the view ports and vacated the bridge. Her feet carried her to the holo-chamber and there, she saw the scientists pouring over a newly projected star system on the larger globe console. Dr. Halsey and the mote-of-light AI were busy cross-checking star maps again. On one of the previously inactive consoles that was now lit up, stood Dr. Solev and Dr. Mosely. Both were examining what looked to be a structural map of the ship.

Leigh saw a few bloody fingertip streaks on the console and traced it to Dr. Solev who was typing away with one hand on his keyboard and the other had wrapped fingertips. Though the fact that the consoles needed blood to be able to activate or operate weighed on her mind, it was the structural map that had her intrigued. From the outline of the ship, she saw that they were near the top, with what looked to be the outline of the bridge jutting out a bit. She estimated that the entire Forerunner ship was over 500 meters from the top of the spire to the bottom, with two separate pieces that seemed to be held together by gravity gradients.

Those two separate pieces were flaring a bit even in this holo-projection, and she could only surmise that it was the propulsive systems. However, what piqued her intrigue was the fact that there were several yellow orbs being highlighted on the lower decks of the ship. Activating a direct beam to Jerrod, she asked, “Jerrod, are those Sentinels?”

“I believe they are, ma’am, though my processes only can provide a ninety-three percent accuracy in confirming that those are Sentinels,” the AI replied.

As her eyes trailed all over the structural projection of the ship, she asked the AI, “Can you project this to the others?”

“Certainly, ma’am,” the AI said.

She switched back to TEAMCOM and said, “Lima, India, and November, stay here and hold ground. Chief and Foxtrot, you’re coming with us.” She then outlined her plan, making sure that she also winked it in Morse code to those who couldn’t hear. This time, instead of being constantly ambushed by Sentinels who had infiltrated the ship, it was their turn to become the predators.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1330 hours, November 15, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, uncharted system.

 

_As recklessly strong-willed as her mother_ , Franklin Mendez thought as he stood as still as he could in the shadows of the enormous chamber where they would be springing their ambush. The armor that Dr. Mosely had fashioned only a few hours ago using a laser scalpel, a charge as a spot welder, and some of the plates she had cut off from the consoles was not a great fit, but at least it would give him some protection. Between the strategic and tactical knowledge that his daughter, Jake, and Fred had combined to plan out this ambush, it was actually a bit chilling to think about if the three had actually pushed through the ranks of fleet or field officers in the war instead of remaining where they were.

Kelly and Jake were going to be the rabbits, hopefully confusing the first Sentinel-pair they were going to lure into this ambush. There were six that showed up on the ships’ map over the visor HUD he had been given by Dr. Mosely, but they were all spread out over the ship, though it was clear that they were slowly making their way up the ship towards where they all were.

Sniping duties had been given to Linda, Team Foxtrot, and Fred, who had borrowed Team November’s sniper rifle. C4 charges that were going to be planted onto the Sentinel-pair to overload their shields from the inside were carried by Leigh, Jake, and Kelly. The rest were going to overload the Sentinel-pair with firepower from their weapons. The only unknown that hinged on this plan working was that they would be able to take down the Sentinel before it blasted a COM scramble to call for reinforcements.

There was a double wink of amber that he saw through his left eye, the sign for enemy contact and sure enough, the marker that had been placed on Kelly was moving fast, coming towards where they were gathered. It was closely followed by the glowing yellow orb that marked a Sentinel-pair. The hunt had begun.

 

Crystal clear calm washed over Jake who stood near the last corridor that Kelly would be dashing into before he took over the rabbit chase. The experimental stealth technology was already active, and he hoped that the Sentinel would not spot him until he wanted to be spotted. It was more advance than what the SPI Mark II armors had, since they had directly ripped the technology from captured Covenant forces and applied it to the armors. However, the lifespan of the complete camo was only about fifteen seconds per activate, though it quickly recharged like the MJOLNIR Mark VI shields. It was supposed to completely cover thermal signatures when activated and though Dr. Mosely had confirmed that her sensor readings could not pick him up, he wasn’t too sure when it came to the Sentinels.

Assuming all went well and neither he nor Kelly got blasted to pieces…he strangled the thought running through his mind as he dimly heard the muted footsteps of a Spartan pounding through the corridors. His aural sensors were boosted to maximum and though he couldn’t feel the footsteps, having been strangely muffled by the metal that was aboard the ship, he crouched and got ready. As soon as he saw the flash of green and golden as the Sentinel’s attacks splattered shards of metal into Kelly’s shields and she dashed into the opposite corridor, he leapt out and deactivated his camo, catching the attention of the Sentinel, confusing it just slightly enough to give him a head start.

He tore down the corridors as fast as he could, counting the lengths between corridors, turning into one and another, all the while hearing the hum of the Sentinel-pair as it accelerated and zipped after him. The hum behind him got just a tad louder and he activated his camo and leapt to the side, just as a beam blast hit the side wall of the corridor that he had been near. He ducked and rolled out of the way as shrapnel flew all over the place and continued down the hall. He could hear the hum of the Sentinel-pair die down just a bit as the machine searched around in confusion.

The camo had worked. Unmasking himself, he heard the hum of the Sentinel-pair start up again and continued to race down the corridors. His breath was becoming very ragged, but adrenaline coursed through his body, pushing him further and faster than he had ever run before. The zaps and superheated shards of metal and plasma pelted off his armor, killing his shields, and he activated his camo once again. He couldn’t give time for his sluggish shields to recharge, and he was nearing the trap. Deactivating the camo again, he turned and fired a couple of rounds into the Sentinel-pair, attracting its attention before he disappeared into the final corridor.

He could hear it tearing after him, and willed himself to put on a burst of speed. He could see Kelly up ahead, standing cool and calm in the enormous chamber and activated his camo just as the searing heat from a close beam blast from the Sentinel-pair struck the metal floor where he had been only seconds ago. However, his camo held, and as the Sentinel spotted Kelly in the room, it fired its weapon at her.

Jake saw her merely sidestep a bit before superheated flecks of metal from the deck sprayed over her armor and shields. As the Sentinel cautiously hovered, most likely sensing a trap, Kelly opened her arms wide for a moment before bringing it back together, lifting one into an ‘L-shape’ and making a fist and slapping the ‘L-shaped’ arm’s biceps with her other hand.

She had given the Sentinel-pair an arcane, insulting gesture that was understood by all of Humanity.

However, in that brief opening of hesitation by the Sentinel, Jake leapt, and at the same time, Leigh, perched high above in the enormous chamber with her camo active, leapt. Together, the two of them, completely cloaked by their experimental stealth suits, smashed through the high-velocity shield into the Sentinel-pair and planted their charges. It whirled around, throwing both of them off and into the walls, but it couldn’t find them.

Kelly took the opportunity to run up to her full speed before pushing off the chamber’s walls and leapt onto the pair, planting her own set of charges. Even before she leapt cleanly off, the resulting explosion, triggered simultaneously by Ash, Olivia, and Mark, was rather muffled. However, the sound of gunfire filled the air as the rest opened fire.

Jake, having landed on his back, unloaded a full clip from the pistol he was carrying as the camo evaporated and shards of metal bounced off his armor. The Sentinel-pair’s shield’s overloaded, died and was ripped apart by the hail of gunfire. He pushed back on the floor with his feet as the metal shards and empty jackets from those above him fell like hot coals. There was a loud hum that steadily increased, but just a he thought the Sentinel-pair was about to unleash a COM burst, it suddenly died and the gunfire stopped.

The hulk of metal of what used to be the Sentinel-pair thudded to the ground, completely shredded that it was barely recognizable. He got up and nudged it with a foot. “One down, five to go,” he said over TEAMCOM.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1500 hours, November 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, uncharted system.

 

Five Sentinel-pairs and several insane, gutsy tactics later, they had finally cleared the ship. After destroying the second Sentinel-pair, they had also found a smaller teleportation device which had enabled them to successfully ambush the rest of the Sentinel-pairs instead of waiting for them to drift up. Now, however, Leigh had ordered all of them to get at least six hours of rest, and that included most of the Marines. Only Team Lima and Chief Mendez had remained on watch.

Several neat rows of rifles, pistols, and all the other weapons they had sat in a corner of one of the enormous rooms they had decided to rest in. Linda was sitting next to the weapons, meticulously cleaning her sniper rifle and examining the magazines that they had left, which was not a lot. A few of the Marines had stayed in the enormous room and were sleeping for the full six hours, while a couple had stated that they were going off to find a quieter area. There were two doors into the place, with one leading straight to the bio-stasis room that now contained the five Forerunner Slipspace pods. The other was a direct route to the ship’s voice-activated teleportation device that was just down the corridor.

The chatter amongst his Spartans was soft as they cleaned out some of the weapons and restocked half-empty magazines with what they had left. Tom was lying slightly haphazardly on the far side of the chamber, sleeping, while Kelly, exhausted from all the sprinting she had to do in the past days, was lying straight-backed near the center of the chamber. Ash, Mark, Olivia, and Lucy were sitting near the pile of weapons, talking quietly amongst themselves, though Fred could see Lucy’s head occasionally bob up and down in agreement or shake side-to-side in disagreement. Jake was sleeping against one of the chamber’s walls, sitting upright, but sleeping with a rifle tucked under one arm. If someone woke him, it would have to be through COM, for Fred knew that the way Jake was tucked would be quite deadly if someone decided to physically disturb him.

Fred scraped his combat knife across the small sharpening stone. Every conventional plan that he had thought of to ambush the Sentinels had been turned into a deranged plan that no one in their right mind would try to pull off in a ship. But that was what it took to bring the Sentinels down. With help from Jake, Kelly, and Ash, they had worked out several scenarios and counter scenarios to take down the remaining five. After the initial ambush, Leigh had returned to the main decks to oversee the operations and to get a few systems working as the scientists continued to figure out the ship’s systems. As promised, she had not taken direct command of the Spartans, leaving it to him to issue orders and plan out their attacks, but he saw the additional burden of captaining an unknown ship on her shoulders, and it weighed more heavily on her than anything else. The only good news to come out of all of this besides the destruction of the six Sentinels was that they had found the weapons system, though it had required a sustained amount of blood to operate it, so the scientists had left it alone.

He flipped the blade over and scraped the other side across the stone. The fact that the ship needed actual blood to operate some of its most crucial systems was another layer to add to his unease. He briefly wondered if the ship was connected to the ruins and the crystal they had found on Reach. He did not stew on the thought. At least the scientists had thought they had finally found out how to read the life support systems, and had given them the welcomed news that they had at least enough air to last quite a while. Food and water was another issue – they were already running half-rations and still did not know how to fine-control the ship to make a possible descent or ascent from a habitable planet.

Morale was very high with his Spartans and the Marines after the six Sentinels had been destroyed, but not so much with the scientists or with Leigh. He had noticed that all of them were frustrated and had sometimes entered the holo-chamber or the bridge to hear at least two of the scientists arguing, though as soon as he entered, they had fallen silent. He kept this knowledge from his Spartans; their morale did not need to be sapped.

He held the blade up and tested its sharpness with a bare finger. Blood welled up from the small prick as soon as he touched the tip. Sharp. Good. He sheathed it and picked up one of the Marine’s blades and looked it over. This one needed a lot of work.

 

“Ma’am, I’m getting a faint signal,” Jerrod’s voice quietly issued from her helmet’s speakers as she stood in the empty bridge, looking at the smaller version of the holo-projector. The scientists had managed to connect and force the larger holo-projection’s image to this one so that she could view both at the same time. She personally thought it was ridiculous to have two systems separated from each other, one a far-jump plotter and the other a system plotter. “I’ve been getting this signal for the past few days, but I thought it was nothing, except it’s been repeating every single time we’re at three-quarters orbit from full around the star.”

“Covenant frequency?”

“No, UNSC E-band,” the AI said.

“Put it through, Jerrod,” she said, and frowned as she faintly heard the Morse-code of ‘S.O.S’. “Can you triangulate the signal?”

“It’s in the Oort cloud of this system--”

“Hold that thought, we have incoming,” she cut the AI off as she saw a small cluster of golden orbs appear on the far side of the system’s maps. However, instead of orbiting the sun, they were headed on an outbound vector…most likely towards the faint signal. She keyed BROADCOM and said, “Rise and shine! They’re back! Brace for intercept jump!”

Not even a minute later, she heard the acknowledgement that a few Spartans were manning the active consoles in the holo-chamber. Jake was manning weapons while Fred was on secondary and calculating firing solutions. Ash was at what could be called engineering, watching the power outputs and structural map while the rest were gathered at the holding positions located in various parts of the ship. She bloodied her fingers on the broken blade again and touched a point in the direct line that the cluster of Sentinels was carving. The bridge’s view ports was instantly awash with the hazy light of angry Sentinels.

“Targeting solution locked, firing,” she heard the calm voice of Jake through TEAMCOM.

Multiple blue beams lanced out from the ship and the Sentinels scattered, though they were constantly herded back into clusters as more beams filled the space between the ship and the star. Leigh watched the dazzling display, but said over BROADCOM, “Fred, triangulate the E-band es-oh-es signal from the Oort cloud. We need to get to them before more Sentinels arrive.”

“Copy,” his curt voice came over the COM.

“Jerrod,” she said in a direct beam to the AI, “can you boost es-oh-es?”

“Negative,” the AI replied. “My systems seem to be currently locked out. I think it was a safeguard whenever the ship is firing its weapons, ma’am.”

A fiery explosion that was quickly quenched by the vacuum briefly tore her attention away as she saw the cluster of Sentinels successfully vaporized to atoms. “Targets eliminated, Leigh,” Jake’s relieved voice came over BROADCOM. “Going to get a band-aid.”

“Copy, and well done team,” she replied over BROADCOM.

“Dropping vector point on the map, ma’am,” Fred said over TEAMCOM.

A blinking marker showed up on the star system map and she examined its location relative to where the Forerunner ship was. It was no coincidence, something was tracking them, and it wasn’t the Sentinels that had been inside the ship. That was just a false marker, something to lull them into a false sense of security. Something else was inside the ship, tracking them, except it had been diverted by the faint SOS signal. The choice was simple, but she would not turn tail and run to another system, not while there were still UNSC personnel stuck in this uncharted and unknown system. How they got there was something she could only speculate, but there was also the possibility that badly-needed supplies could be cannibalized from the ship that was broadcasting the signal.

She touched the marker on the star system map and the ship jumped. Leave no man behind.

 

* * *

 

0340 hours, May 14, 2553 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard the UNSC _Spirit of Fire_ , Oort cloud of uncharted system.

 

“Captain, wake up. Something has happened.”

 

~*~*~*~


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1530 hours, November 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Oort cloud of uncharted system.

 

“ _Spirit of Fire_ ,” she whispered as she absently let her hand go from the globe and stared out of the view ports.

Floating in the darkness of space with everything powered off and only the faint sunlight glinting off its metal hull, she was just a hulk of space debris, but Leigh had studied the case of the vessel and her crew, declared ‘lost with all hands’ by the UNSC in 2534. To any other, the _Spirit of Fire_ would have looked like a colony ship, albeit an oddly fitted colony ship, but she knew the general outside specs of the ship. ONI had hoped that as a side project during the various missions that she and her strike team were sent on would yield clues as to what happened to the ship. However, even with the dim external lights from the Forerunner ship, the lost vessel looked like it had been through hell and back.

“Jerrod, can you pilot this ship?” she asked over a direct beam to the AI.

“Unable to comply, ma’am,” the AI replied. “If I’m translating this correctly, it seems that the system only accepts user interface to fine-tune moving and no AI control.”

“Lieutenant, have you initiated the jump yet?” Dr. Halsey’s voice came through her speakers.

“I have, doctor,” she replied, broadcasting over BROADCOM. “The signal is from the _Spirit of Fire_. She was declared ‘lost with all hands’ back in thirty-four. I’m going to try to maneuver us in for a hard-dock. Use the beam to--”

“Lieutenant Hattersfield,” Jerrod cut into her orders through a tight-beam channel, “I am receiving a query through the Forerunner network from the ship’s aye-ai.”

“Standby,” she said back over BROADCOM and switched over to the direct beam channel to Jerrod. “Serina? She’s still active? How did she know to contact us through the Forerunner network?”

“She is quite active, though I do warn you to be careful. Shall I connect you?”

“Do it, and pipe it through BROADCOM,” she said, though she did note that Jerrod had not given her explanation to her third question.

“…-- _irit of Fire_ aye-ai Serina to unidentified Forerunner ship. This is the United Nations Space Command Navy vessel _Spirit of Fire_ aye-ai Serina to unidentified Forerunner ship. Do you receive? Do you even understand me?”

“ _Spirit of Fire_ aye-ai, this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Leigh Hattersfield of the UNSC Navy. I am captain of this vessel and I receive you loud and clear,” she stated.

“Confirm voice-print match data on file,” the AI said, “it is good to hear your voice, Lieutenant. I do not however, confirm your rank. Might I ask how did you find us? Is the war over? How many have survived? Is Humanity still alive? Where are the Covenant?”

Questions flooded her speakers as the AI dumped it all in one rapid burst without pausing and with an effort, she shouted, “Serina! Stop! I can’t answer everything if you don’t let me!”

The jabbering immediately ceased and the cultured accent of the AI came back after a moment’s pause saying, “It’s good to hear your voice Lieutenant.”

“It’s good to hear you too,” she carefully answered. She was surprised that Serina was still active and had not succumbed to Rampancy, though it seemed that she was not entirely stable either. Leigh knew that she had to tread very carefully. “What is the status of your vessel?”

“Drifting, ma’am,” the AI replied. “I am using what is left of our power just to communicate and hail you. I have woken Captain Cutter up, though there will not be enough air in the cryo section where he is, left after one hour. All other non-essential personnel have been deactivated.”

Leigh felt a chill crawl through her as she absorbed the AI’s words, but kept her tone steady and controlled as she said, “Define deactivated, Serina.”

Instead of answering her request, Serina said, “I can reroute power to thrusters and adjust the drift for a hard dock with your mast airlock.”

There was no stopping the AI, and she did not want to get into an argument with a potentially volatile and dangerous entity. However, the fact that Serina had woken up the captain of the ship meant that there were possibilities that others still survived and she was not quite Rampant. It was best not to antagonize the AI and tread carefully around her. She said to the AI, “Very well. Standby for rescue.” She disconnected the line, muted the cascade of protests over BROADCOM, and returned to the direct COM beam to Jerrod, asking, “How did Serina know to contact us through the Forerunner network?”

“That I do not know ma’am,” the AI replied.

“Monitor her and if she invades the network, disconnect and activate propulsive systems for jump. We can’t compromise this ship with a possible rampant AI aboard the other.”

“You are aware that I am not even a generational AI such as she, ma’am?” Jerrod worriedly asked.

“I have full confidence in you, Jerrod,” she replied. “After all, Dr. Halsey’s work always reflects the best in what she creates.”

The AI was silent and she disconnected that COM beam and returned to her attention to the chatter through BROADCOM. She heard the protests from both Dr. Mosely and Dr. Solev, along with the grumblings from Neil Rousseau and Dr. Reinhart, but surprisingly, Dr. Halsey was silent. She cut into the noise and said, “Dr. Halsey.” The chatter fell silent and she continued, “I need you to talk to Serina and extract the logs of what happened to her and the ship since their disappearance from Arcadia in thirty-one. I also expect an assessment of her Rampancy in five minutes.” To the Spartans, she said, “Oxygen check.”

“Full tank, ninety minutes, ma’am,” Fred replied.

“Ma’am,” Ash piped up, “Es-threes have seven minutes on full tank.”

“If you can find tanks use them. Our priority is survivors, supplies, and ordinances. Jake, retrieve the aye-ai. _Spirit of Fire_ looks like it can fall apart any minute,” she said. “Marines, stay where you are and the minute you hear anything that’s not human down below move, let me know. Time is not on our side, and the Sentinels will be expecting their scouts to report back soon.”

There was a chorus of ‘yes, ma’am’ and a few that winked green across her HUD with their acknowledgement of the orders.

 

Cold calm had replaced the usual pre-mission jitters Fred got as the teleportation device dumped them back into the mast airlock they had entered back in the Shield World. Jerrod had done a good job in inputting a translation of English to whatever the language of the Forerunners were into the system of the foreign and still mysterious ship. The nauseous feeling quickly went away as he and his Spartans fanned out as the creaking metallic sounds of a ship-to-ship hard dock pinged all over the place.

As he heard the slightly tinny voice of the AI sound that hard dock was achieved over BROADCOM, he keyed an overlay of the _Phoenix_ -class ship and quickly memorized the possible levels that the cryo pods, munitions storage, and food supply areas were on. As soon as the order had been given for the search and rescue mission, he had ordered Ash to retrieve all possible blueprints for the ship. Ash had also done a good job and even given him labeled information.

Harsh light flickered all over the place as Olivia hoisted up their converted laser retrieved from one of the Sentinels earlier and successfully modified by Drs. Mosely and Reinhart, and burned through the hull of the _Spirit of Fire_. It took longer than Fred would have liked, but as soon as she finished, there was no audible _thunk_ heard of the rounded opening that was made. There was a slight tug forward as the atmosphere of the Forerunner ship equalized as best as it could with the thin atmosphere on the other side. With lamplights activated, they all saw the hulk of metal float off – there was no gravity on the ship.

“Move out,” he ordered over the localized TEAMCOM, and as soon as he crossed the threshold between gravity and no gravity, queasiness and rapid flip-flops of his stomach swept over him. However, his magnetized boots settled on the metal deck with a _click_ , and he swept the corridor with his lamplight. His sensors told him that there was air here, but it was minimal at best. There were, however, a lot of what looked like burn marks that traveled from the floor to the ceiling, and he surmised that wirings in the place had burned and sparked, consuming most of the oxygen in this area until there was almost nothing left. He did recognize that they had entered on the same deck as one of the chambers that a few cryo pods were on.

“Tom and Lucy head nadir. Supplies should be on the port side. Ash, take your team and head starboard to the weapons lockers and check as many decks as you can. Kelly and Linda, on me,” he ordered and saw seven green lights flash across his HUD.

As Blue Team spread out, he headed right, towards where he could see the entrance to the cryo pod chamber. They entered the first set of doors, loosened and slightly ajar and Fred felt a touch of dread line his stomach. The second set of doors was completely opaque, covered by ice-crystals. As both he and Linda found the connecting seams to the second door and forced it open, Kelly pointed her weapon straight into the chamber as the air on the deck they had been traversing in completely vacated, pushing into their backs.

No one said anything as they cautiously made their way into the enormous and long chamber, completely ripped into hanging shreds of metal and tube shards. Their headlamps made dazzling reflections of ice and glass shards from shattered cryo tubes and pieces of the machineries that had powered the tubes. There was nothing left of the occupants of the tubes, having been completely shattered by the overwhelming lack of pressure from vacuum, though there were pieces of what looked to be ice-covered clothing floating around. With his headlamp pointed towards the inky darkness, it barely illuminated what looked to be a large, exposed section of the hull, which was supposed to be at least five meters away from the cryo chamber. The _Spirit of Fire_ ’s hull looked liked it had been hammered by several large objects.

“Meteorite impacts?” Linda quietly suggested over the COM.

“Let’s go,” he said, turning back and making is way back out. He felt sick. The men and women in this particular cryo chamber had no chance to escape to a stronger, more reinforced section of the ship. Instead, they had been spaced. His teammates followed him, silent.

Back in the main corridor, they continued, passing Ash and his team and saw that they had hooked up additional oxygen tanks to their armor. Fred and his team made their way down to the next level on the ship, hoping that other survivors could be found in the next cryo chamber. As soon as the three of them entered the first set of doors and it sealed to equalize the pressure of a fully oxygenated atmosphere in the cryo pod chamber, the second set of doors opened and their lamplights fixated on the sole occupant in the cryo chamber.

“Sir,” Fred said as he, Kelly, and Linda snapped to attention, seeing the stars and bars on the uniform of what he could only assume the man floating before one of the other cryo pods, was Captain Cutter.

“Spartans?” Captain Cutter whispered, his voice hoarse, most likely still recovering from exiting cryo sleep. The captain returned their salutes and said, “Serina didn’t say anything about there being Spartans aboard the Forerunner ship.”

“Apologies, Captain,” Serina’s cool, cultured voice came over the speakers in this chamber at a whisper. “I am conserving what little power there is left. I recommend thawing the rest of the crew in this chamber. Most of the others are not recoverable. I also recommend ee-vee-aye suits, Captain. There are places aboard the ship where vacuum only exists.”

“What’s happened to my ship, Serina?” Captain Cutter whispered.

“She’s dead,” the AI bluntly replied. “We’ve been drifting for what I estimate as the greater part of six hundred days.”

“What year is it?”

“Unknown,” Serina replied. “I have shut down all non-essential functions since we last spoke. I only had enough power to wake you.”

“Sir,” Fred interrupted, knowing that time was essential, “Recommend flash thawing all remaining personnel and evacuating to the Forerunner ship.”

“Do it,” Captain Cutter whispered, nodding a bit as he floated over to the small locker units near the entrance to the chamber and began extracting EVA suits.

“Sir, I will divert all remaining power to pods,” the AI stated. “I will also be extracted from my housing in a few seconds.”

“Understood,” Captain Cutter replied.

Fred, Kelly, and Linda spread out along the chamber and started to punch in the overrides for the cryo pods. Flash thawing was a dangerous process, Fred knew that, but under the circumstances, they did not have the luxury of time or the necessary amount of air to support the slow process of the regular thawing. However, as he continued to move down the line of pods, the next cryo pod he encountered caused him to stop short and stare at the name that was etched on the outside of the pod.

“Sir? Fred?” Kelly worriedly asked over COM. She had seen him pause.

It couldn’t be true, but it was, as he moved over another step and another, confirming three names that had been listed as MIA since the _Spirit of Fire_ had been declared lost. He quickly punched the override in all three pods. Of all those who were being flash-thawed, he knew that they would survive the process – they were conditioned to respond well to flash thawing.

“Jerome…Alice…Douglas…” Kelly whispered over the COM as she quickly made her way over to where Fred was before giving a nod of satisfaction and headed back to her slate of pods to activate.

Fred continued down the row of pods, and dimly heard the ping of the first of the pods completing its emergency thawing cycle. As more pings filled the air, the dim light in the room was starting to fade; would they have enough power to complete most of the thaws?

 

Null gravity was as much of a home to Jake as solid ground was, having been cross-trained at Chiron after Basic, as he drifted through the debris that littered this section of the ship. According to his nav marker in his HUD, the bridge was ahead, though it looked like the door was completely sealed. That meant that no atmosphere resided in the bridge.

Pulling out his pistol, he pushed himself over to where the floor and the wall were adjacent to each other and magnetized his boots. They clipped to the floor and he flattened himself as best as he could against the wall. With one arm out to brace the reaction force and the other extended with the weapon, he fired and felt himself rock back into the ground. The air rushing by him as it escaped into the null pressure helped him push back up and he holstered his gun as the remainder of the air around the area finally escaped and settled down again.

De-magnetizing his boots, he pushed off again and this time, the doors to the bridge slid easily apart with little force, and he was rewarded with the sight of at least half of the bridge missing. Twisted beams of metal and hull framed the enormous hole on the port side of the bridge while pieces of metal, glass, rock, and other unidentifiable debris littered the place, though they were slowly moving outwards from the entrance. The core system where the ship’s AI transfer chip was stored was still intact though, near the starboard-aft wall.

He carefully navigated his way into the room, keeping an eye on the sharp metal pieces sticking out all over the place, along with the shards floating everywhere. His suit did not have a self sealant unit and any rupture could prove instantly fatal. Checking his mission timer, he noted that he only had about fifteen minutes of air left. Thirty minutes maximum was all the amount of self-contained air that his and Leigh’s suits could supply. He knew that he should have taken a tank that the Gamma Company Spartans found, but judging from the debris that littered the corridors as he was making his way here, a rupture to his tank could cause even more complications that he did not need.

As he neared the storage unit where the AI transfer chip was, a small hologram of a woman with long dark hair and dressed in an outfit that was similar to an ONI researcher’s outfit on official business popped up. She had an impish smirk on her face and he heard the AI whisper, “Took you long enough.”

Instead of being offended, he grinned, though he knew that the AI couldn’t see it. Like Leigh, he had read up on the files of the _Spirit of Fire_ , and he knew that Serina had a bitingly sarcastic personality. He had always wondered if Eryn had survived and had met up with this AI, how humorous would their conversations be. He had also heard Dr. Halsey’s assessment on the AI’s Rampancy judging from the brief conversation it had with Leigh. The doctor had not classified Serina as completely Rampant, but neither did she classify her as meta-stable. This was a first case that anyone had encountered with an AI had had survived through Rampancy and had not been destroyed. He had to be careful with what he said back to the AI, but that didn’t mean he had to be entirely serious like Leigh was to all other AIs. When it came to AIs, he knew that his friend was very cautious around them, not really entirely trusting them, even if they were still in their stable periods of life.

“Wanted to enjoy the view a bit,” he replied. “Ready to go?”

“Diverting all power to remaining cryo chambers,” the AI stated. “I’ll miss this bucket of bolts…”

He said nothing and palmed the ejection slot and a small chip popped out. Tucking the chip inside a small compartment built into his armor, he pushed off and maneuvered his way back out of the chamber. He drifted and continued to push his way back to the ship, but when he was halfway there, his COM crackled and he heard Leigh say, “Multiple enemy contacts! Estimated at firing range in three minutes! Weapons offline! Evac and return!”

He winked double green for acknowledgement. Three minutes meant that the Sentinels had emerged from Slipspace where the previous scout team had emerged, judging from the speed at which they had been moving towards the signal earlier. It had taken him a solid twelve minutes to get to the bridge on a regular null-gravity pace – he had to book it.

He grabbed a hold of his next hand hold and braced his feet against the floor, _pushing_ with all of his strength, sailing through the clutter of debris. Using minimal touches with his arms and hands, he evaded the sharp edges, and maneuvered his way around while keeping his legs as straight as possible. He dove up and down the corridors, as the three minute mark on his mission timer counted down. With less than a minute to go, he could see the looming entrance at the end of the corridor and gave one last final send off with his feet.

 

There was no happy reunion with any of the three Spartans who had been designated as the original Spartan Red Team, for as soon as Jerome, Alice, and Douglas had been thawed, Leigh’s voice had cracked all over those tuned into the frequency of TEAMCOM. Fred had opened up a channel to his formerly missing-in-action teammates and had also turned his external speakers on so that Captain Cutter, who was helping those lucky personnel who had survived the flash-thaw into EVA suits, could hear.

“Enemy contact,” he stated, “ee-tee-aye less than three minutes. Weapons systems non-functional. Move out!” He placed a nav marker on his HUD and linked it to the others.

“Sir--” Kelly protested, but strangled the protest and finished up with a, “Yes, sir.”

Fred did not like the fact that they had to abandon all the others in this cryo chamber, but with the power rapidly draining; perhaps it was a mercy killing that at least most of the crew did not have to wake up only to be killed by Sentinels. He had to concentrate on making sure the rest survived, even if the captain was his senior officer and protested. Compared to the rest of them, even though it seemed like Leigh had little to no bridge officer experience, she needed help. It wasn’t that he doubted her ability to lead; it was that they were so few in a ship so enormous.

However, he did not find it reassuring that the weapons system had gone offline again. First it was the intermittent propulsion, now it was weapons, critical systems that they needed, though he had not heard anything about the propulsion which meant that they could still escape. Red Team snapped to and without another word they helped the remaining disoriented crew members who had not perished, out of the chamber and hurried to the airlock.

The captain was the last of the survivors to drift out of the cryo chamber as he followed, and as his mission timer counted quickly down, he followed them. Just as he was about to de-magnetize his boots to drift back over the airlock and into gravity, he saw the accelerated drift of Jake speed towards the airlock. His timer read ten seconds. The first generation Spartan executed an incredibly deft null-grav to grav flip, landing lightly and he quickly followed. The Forerunner’s airlock tightly closed and he felt the slight tug backwards as the ship made the jump.

They were safe again…for now.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 2000 hours, November 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

An enormous wash of asteroids from the proto-planetary disc that spanned for millions of kilometers away from the yellow star gave all of them an exploded view of the system they had jumped into. There was also a thin layer of irradiated gaseous cloud that had not completely dissolved from the long-ago explosion, and they were sitting right in the middle of the band. It hadn’t entirely affected the ship’s system, but it had completely shut down the teleportation device, along with any access to open locked doors, thus they were confined to the decks of the ship they could manually access, which was only three levels down from the bridge and a side airlock.

Their jump had been successful, but a few Sentinels had gotten into the ship’s lower decks, though judging from the structural map, the machines had not moved. It seemed that the radiation cloud was also disabling their movement. It was both a good and a bad thing; good because they couldn’t reach the Sentinels to destroy them, and bad because if they jumped, then there was a great possibility that the Sentinels could alert reinforcements to their location.

“I know why this system looks familiar…” Fred heard Leigh mutter as the two of them, along with Jake, Captain Cutter, and the scientists stood near the projection in the holo-chamber.

Only Captain Cutter, a scientist by the title and name of Professor Ellen Anders, the Spartans of Red Team, and a few Marines had survived the flash thaw and the subsequent evacuation. Professor Anders and the Marines were still recovering from flash thaw and had been moved to the bio-stasis room. When Fred had been down there earlier to escort Dr. Halsey and make doubly sure that nothing was coming in and out of the locked doors, he had caught the surprisingly cold look on the doctor’s face when she saw the professor. However, she had only thinned her lips and said nothing and proceeded to her tasks of monitoring and making sure that the survivors were recovering. As a precaution, he had posted Ash there to make sure that the doctor was not going to pull anything like she did with Kelly before.

“Hattersfield?” Captain Cutter’s query sounded a bit gravelly and still hoarse.

“Librae Tauri,” Leigh said. “ONI listening post Omega was stationed here, on the assumed edge of Covenant-controlled space back in the early years of the war. Before that, it had been controlled by a black market cartel that was supplying arms and ammunition to the Insurrectionists. Jake, Eryn, a former team member, and I had been sent here back in twenty-five to shut the cartel down. ONI established the listening post in twenty-seven. The advancement of the Covenant armada in thirty forced ONI to abandon the post.”

She gestured to the asteroid field, “No one in their right mind would build a base in the middle of a densely irradiated area, even if it was in an asteroid field, but the cartel had enough funds for meter-thick solid lead walls to be lined all around the base. If you look closely at some of these asteroids floating around, they have hollowed out holes that are man-made. They hid turrets in what the three of us called a ‘kill zone’ – far enough away from their base so they had forewarning, but close enough to retrieve anything that hadn’t been destroyed by the other asteroids or by their turrets. Small maneuvering thrusters made it easy for them to control the asteroids to lengthen or shorten their ‘kill zone’, though they didn’t move them much, due to the radiation messing up their signals.”

“Is it possible that this base still exists?” Captain Cutter asked.

“Possible, though doubtful,” Leigh replied. “It was tethered to at least three other asteroids to act as shields and to keep it from wobbling off, though by now, with out thrusters or control moments gyros, it may have finally smashed into other asteroids or wobbled out of orbit. However, if the base still exists, there may be a chance that we can get the Sentinels off our tails.”

The captain put a hand on his grizzled chin for a moment and finally said, “Leftover armaments? Explain your theory again, Lieutenant.”

“Sir,” Jake spoke up, “If I may?”

Captain Cutter nodded and Jake said, “From the intel we gathered on the Onyx Sentinels is that compared to the variation that you encountered in the shipyard Shield World, and the ones encountered by those who survived the destruction of Halo construct over Threshold, the Onyx Sentinels are programmed differently than their brethren. Their aggression was not triggered by Spartan gee-zero-nine-nine when one of the constructs tried to communicate with him, since we’ve discovered evidence that the constructs had aggressively attacked another team back in thirty-nine.

“We believe that they communicate via hive mind, due to their adaptive measures taken whenever we managed to destroy them. How they instantaneously communicate through the interstellar medium to the rest, we haven’t been able to figure out. Since we have a few onboard the ship, though they still look inert, any attempt we make to jump out of this system may cause them to instantly alert the rest. They most likely have learned from the last time we managed to destroy the six constructs who had lingered here,” Jake finished.

The captain was silent for a few long moments as he again, contemplated the situation they were in. As soon as they had jumped and secured the ship, Captain Cutter and Red Team had been given a full debrief of the things that had happened since he and his crew had been declared missing. However, Fred had noticed that both Leigh and Jake had left a few things out, concerning their affiliation with ONI Section Zero. It was a lot of information to give to the captain, and he had been mostly preoccupied with the fact that the war had progressed so far with so much devastation. As soon as the briefing was over, Fred had dismissed Red Team, but had told Kelly on a private channel to give them the full story on the SPARTAN-III’s, along with what they knew of Section Zero. He did not want his people left in the dark.

That had been only a half-hour ago and there was still the question of what to do with the AI, Serina, who was still in her chip, most likely listening in to the conversations. However, the chip was an outdated model for the current time, so she wasn’t able to reply or input her knowledge to the conversation. Leigh had been adamant about not letting Serina into the ship’s systems, even though Jerrod had stated that there had been more than enough room to accommodate two AIs. She wanted Dr. Halsey to run a full diagnostic scan on the AI before even considering letting the AI into the system. He had to agree with her logic; there was too much at risk to let a Rampant AI run freely, though he only had a basic knowledge of what Rampancy meant to an AI. The other scientists had offered up their own opinions of the AI, but they too were at a lost – it would be up to Dr. Halsey to apply her expertise in this situation. Jake had surprisingly remained silent about the AI.

Currently though, Fred wanted to leave and rejoin the others down in the second level from the holo-chamber, but he knew that he couldn’t leave. He was no longer a NCO, but an officer. That had added responsibilities and weight and created an enormous gulf between him and the other Spartans. The comradeship between him and his Spartans were still there, but the friendliness had all but evaporated. Being an officer felt different than what he had experienced as an NCO leader during Reach, but that was a poor example to compare it to. They were trying not to get annihilated at Reach. Instead, there seemed to be a greater sense of respect and distance, and he could hear it in both Kelly and Linda’s voices whenever he talked to them. He could no longer openly express his feelings with his teammates whenever he sat with them during the rare downtime they had; had to repress them even further as an officer to maintain authority. Since entering the Onyx Shield World, he had hated that.

He saw Captain Cutter put his hands back onto the console and stare hard at the projected system before him, seemingly lost in thought before saying, “According to what we saw on the shipyard Shield World, the Sentinels there seemed to destroy both the parasitic creatures you said were called Flood, along with both Covenant and Human forces. Barring Spartan-gee-zero-nine-nine’s communication with the Sentinels, is it possible that there may be some Flood-based forms on the ship that’s causing these Sentinels to continuously attack?”

Fred looked at both Jake and Leigh as they looked at each other and also at him. The scientists had stopped in their tracks with whatever they were doing. None of them had considered this possibility. That was both a chilling and sobering thought.

They had been running from the Sentinels and trying to find a way back to Earth through the unknown star maps, all the while under the assumption that the Onyx Sentinels had been aggressively targeting them because of complications that happened in Zone 67. Fred noted that Dr. Reinhart did never tell them what exactly he and the others had been studying in the secretive zone, and neither did Leigh or Jake offer up explanations to the others. However, he did remember that the doctor had stated that they had not activated the Sentinels and alluded to the theory that something that happened at the Halo installation must have triggered the Onyx Sentinels. But how would that explain the uncanny near-instantaneous communication abilities the Sentinels had to bring others to where they were?

“Captain,” Dr. Reinhart started, “Spartan-gee-zero-nine-nine did state that the Sentinel he encountered clearly said in Latin, ‘non-sequitur’. Drawing from the logic of that statement, the Sentinel constructs clearly does not differentiate between what is Flood and what is non-Flood. It was waiting for a proper counter response and does not see Humans as what the Monitor of the Halo installation had called Humans as ‘Reclaimers’. Therefore, it may see us as Flood-forms and seek us out to make sure that we don’t ‘infect’ other worlds.”

“I estimate that we’ve only covered ten percent of this ship, sir,” Leigh spoke up. “The structural layout of the ship does not register any other life forms other than us and the Sentinels aboard this ship. However, if there are Flood-forms, sweeping for them may be easier if the Sentinels have stopped pursuing us, sir.”

“Jerrod, what do you have?” Captain Cutter asked.

“With all due respect Captain, my processing power is very limited in this capacity. Out of the billions of asteroids in this field, I only covered about a thousand hundred since you’ve given me this task,” the AI said in a very annoyed tone. “Frankly, I’m not even sure that what I’m operating qualifies as a scanner.”

That was yet another problem to add to their already full plate of troubles. Since Dr. Halsey had placed Jerrod into the Forerunner system, the AI had been able to expand a bit to no longer fit in a portable way that the doctor had used to carry the AI. However, there had also been a limit to how much the AI could expand – and it was purely from the base coding that had been written into the AI. The doctor had tried to change it, but it seemed that the left over processing subroutines and fragmented base codes from the previous construct that had occupied the ship had deterred her efforts. Dr. Halsey had not been happy.

“All I have found are ferrorite, calcified, nickel-iron, olivine, basaltic, or carbonaceous asteroids,” the AI continued. “I have found fragments of what could be the turrets you’ve mentioned, Lieutenant Hattersfield, and of hollowed holes that may look man-made, but I can only be eighty-three percent accurate of the assessment.”

“Is there a COM button on this thing?” the captain asked.

“That’s another system we haven’t yet been able to crack, sir,” Leigh said as Dr. Solev offered Captain Cutter his head set.

Captain Cutter took the ear piece and hooked it over his left ear and pressed the button near the ear, activating BROADCOM and said, “Dr. Halsey, please report to the holo-chamber.”

“Sir, I’ll be going down to the bio-stasis room,” Dr. Yelchin said. “I’m not a qualified medical doctor, but I know some of the basics that need to be monitored for a flash thaw.”

The captain nodded and Dr. Yelchin left, only to be replaced minutes later by Dr. Halsey, who walked in with an expected look on her face. Before Captain Cutter could even say anything, she said, “It will take me at least a half-day to run a full diagnostic on Serina, Captain.”

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1945 hours, November 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space. Fifteen minutes ago.

 

The bio-stasis room was one of the quietest places that they had secured in the three-level deep corridors and chambers. The five pods that contained Team Katana were situated on the far side of the room, inserted into their holders, but still they had not managed to crack open the pods. It seemed that that place was just a holder for the pods, though there were several interesting devices on the sides of the holders that none of them had been able to translate yet.

Dr. Halsey was tempted to just punch in random buttons on the devices to see what it would yield, but if she accidentally killed one of Team Katana, then… She didn’t even need to think about it. She needed the SPARTAN-IIIs trust, and in the time that she had spent with them, which had been far and few in between, she could see their receptiveness, but still guarded thoughts and eyes. They were satisfied that the promise of a possible Forerunner cache had yielded a ship, though none of them were happy that the Onyx Sentinels were still pursing them.

“Jerrod, bio-status update, please,” she quietly said into a direct beam COM as the chatter from the discussion happening in the holo-chamber continued as a background noise. It had not taken her long to crack one of the headsets that the others wore and she had been listening to the briefing that was given to Captain Cutter. TEAMCOM, however, had been trickier to hack into, and it had taken her the better part of a scattered week to finally succeed in accessing the network.

“They’re all in REM sleep, ma’am,” Jerrod’s voice came back after a few moments. She knew that the AI had been over taxed lately with translations and processing requests from the others. She had been initially pleased that the AI had grown when it settled itself into the left over systems that the previous construct had abandoned – she was sure it had been abandoned – but was not pleased when her attempts to change the base code of the AI had been blocked. Leftover subroutines and base programming in the Forerunner language and numerics had prevented her from tinkering with Jerrod, and translations down to this level of Forerunner technology were something that the AI had not touched yet.

She had attempted the translations herself, but even her skills in cryptology and abstraction formulae could not get through. The mathematical logic that governed the base of the AI construct system was not even at the abstract level – it was beyond her comprehension. She had prided on herself on being able to figure everything out, but it looked like this was a stumper. She sighed. If only Cortana was here to help her…her age and all the deficiencies with it were starting to creep up on her.

“Ma’am, might I suggest less demacotic steroids in a half-hour? Perhaps it will help speed up the Marines’ and Professor Ander’s healing,” Jerrod continued.

“Do it, please,” she said, continuing to type away at her laptop. Half of the screen was taken up by the Forerunner symbols while the other half had monitors of all those laying in the bio-stasis room, still recovering from their flash thaw.

She glanced up and frowned as her eyes locked onto the dark-haired woman who was laying on one of the table-consoles in the room, covered by a thermal blanket. The clothes that her former student, Ellen Anders, had wore were stuck to her skin, and it seemed that she had many of the others had been cryo-ed in haste. The thermal blanket was there to unstuck her clothes, but also to keep the demacotic steroids that were there to prevent the rapid healing and scarring of freezer-burned skin from evaporating too much in this dry chamber.

Hate was not a strong enough word to describe her feelings for her former student. The woman was arrogant and insufferable to a point where she could no longer tolerate it…that and she had always had an annoying habit of putting everything in an orderly fashion. That had included Catherine’s own desk – to which that had been one of the last straws and she had dismissed Anders from their co-op. The other had been the project they had been working on during the woman’s studies, xenobiology on the ruins found on several worlds that was now known to be Forerunner ruins – that had turned into an extremely heated discussion on the limitations on Human genetics. Of course, Anders had not known about the SPARTAN-IIs at the time, but she, Catherine, had been adamant about her own opinions and points. Now however, she wondered what her former student thought of the Spartans that served aboard the _Spirit of Fire_.

That brought her eyes to the SPARTAN-III, Ash, standing near the Slipspace pods. Though the young Spartan had entered the bio-stasis room with the pretense of wanting to just visit his immobile teammates, Dr. Halsey was not dumb; clearly he had been sent down here to keep an eye on her. She saw the respect and trust that the SPARTAN-IIIs had for the others, but it was more distant with Lieutenants Hattersfield and Creighton, so she had a good hunch as to who gave the order to Ash.

That was more troubling to her than it actually emotionally hurt her to lose a bit of the implicit trust she had with the SPARTAN-IIs. But they were never likely to be swayed from the battle and war she was trying to drag them out of. She had originally considered Lieutenant Hattersfield as a viable candidate to potentially sway the woman to see the fact that they were not going to win this war, even with a barely-understood Forerunner ship, but she had never gotten a chance to talk to her since that morning at the Shield World camp. Perhaps with Captain Cutter now most likely in charge, she could talk to the woman, but it seemed that the SPARTAN-IIIs were more like curious children than they were soldiers whenever there was downtime.

“Ash,” she said, folding her hands on the table while the translational algorithm that she had hastily updated a couple of days ago continued to run. With a small touch of one of the keys on her laptop that was meant to look like another set of algorithms to run below the translational algorithm, she also made sure to completely gag Jerrod’s direct link with the SPARTAN-III. It was similar to the gag she had initiated on Cortana when she had given John the crystal that contained Sergeant Johnson’s condition, except simpler to implement on a limited AI.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, turning from the Slipspace pods, walked towards her and stood at attention about a meter-and-a-half away.

“We will find a way to free them,” she said, indicating with her eyes towards the pods.

“I have faith that you will, ma’am,” Ash said.

“Allow me to ask you a question, Ash,” she said, pleased that the young Spartan was receptive. “What do you think of the previous SPARTAN-III companies?”

“Ma’am?” he asked, a bit confused. “I’m not sure I understand the question… They’re all good soldiers, if that’s what you’re asking. Their valiant sacrifices have ensured that Humanity kept enduring this war.”

“Exactly,” she said, nodding slightly. “Humanity has endured this war thus far, but for how long? Reach has fallen, and the Covenant is already at Earth… Have you considered if there will be anything left to fight for if we return to Earth with this ship? Demoralizing as it may be to the Covenant if we showed up on Earth’s doorsteps at the eve of her greatest needs, we don’t even know a tenth of this ship’s operational capabilities. In the event that the Covenant may consider us as heretics, they may even storm the ship…and that scenario is only if we figure out how to get back to Earth. Lieutenant Commander Ambrose’s sacrifice to make sure the Covenant did not enter the Shield World ensured us a chance to survive. We--”

“Dr. Halsey, please report to the holo-chamber,” the slightly tinny voice of Captain Cutter said over the COM, cutting off what she was about the say.

“Ma’am…I…” Ash began, and then fell silent.

“We can discuss this later, Ash,” she said, rising from her seat and taking her laptop with her. What she hoped was a seed of the basic human instinct to survive and live to fight another day had been planted. She had gone over a few theoretical mental states that the Gamma Company Spartans would be in with their type of augmentations, and it had her slightly worried. But if nurtured correctly, then the fight or flight compulsion could eventually be manifested…except it would take a long time. But they were lost in space right now, so she had plenty of time in her hands.

For now, though, she had other tasks to focus on hand. She knew that the officers were also deliberating about the AI, Serina. That was the only other reason they would call her up. It would take her just half-a-day to run what she had preliminarily coded up as a rough diagnostic for the AI to determine her full Rampancy, and to also rewrite some of Serina’s programming, though she was treading in waters she had never touched before.

This she had to do without Jerrod’s help, and she had a hunch that it was going to be tricky.

 

~*~*~*~


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 2235 hours, November 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

The Spartans, minus Fred and Ash, all sat in a smaller chamber than the one they had previously occupied on their last downtime, taking stock of what ammunition they had recovered. The Marines were on supply detail, as was Chief Mendez, and they were situated in another chamber. Clips, magazines, and even a few egg crates of fragmentation grenades and explosives had been successfully recovered by Ash and his team, and now they were all laid out in neat rows. Side arms, shotguns, and rifles of varying degrees were sitting next to the ammunition. There had also been a surprising recovery of an Anti-Vehicle Model 6 Galileian Nonlinear Rifle, more commonly known as the Spartan Laser.

Linda was currently cleaning the sniper rifles with the loving care of a mother to a newborn while Mark and Olivia were inspecting the rounds for the magnums and shotguns. Tom and Lucy were cleaning the assault rifles while Alice was busy with the sub-machine guns. That left Douglas who was inspecting the rest of the magazines with a practiced eye, and Jerome, who was carefully calibrating the Spartan Laser. Kelly grinned to herself as she set down the barrel of the assault rifle that was currently disassembled before her.

She was quite happy that three of their previously presumed dead teammates had been recovered. The initial reception that the SPARTAN-IIIs had towards Red Team was a little rocky for both sides, but after the explanation of how the SPARTAN-III Program came about was given to them, Red Team accepted them with a shrug, or at least Jerome had shrugged. But then again, Kelly herself did have her doubts about the SPARTAN-IIIs until she had seen them in action against the Covenant. However, it seemed that there was more that the SPARTAN-IIIs could relate to with Red Team, since they were closer in age and Red Team definitely had not been hardened by the war as much as she, Fred, or Linda had been.

Jerome, the original commander of Red Team during the early years of the war, was quiet like the rest of them, but a good leader if given a small strike force. Kelly also remembered that he had an uncanny knack in accuracy with the Spartan Laser, even if he was being jostled around.

On the other hand, Douglas was most definitely one of the few of them to have a short fuse. He was a heavy-weapons specialist and tended to have a slightly destructive, overkill streak, even when they had been children. She remembered the one time during their training that Chief Mendez had left scattered boxes of paint grenades in the woods. That had resulted in an overkill of paint grenades upon one of the teams, when Blue Team had stumbled across Green Team who had been splattered by Red Team. Since that training session, Chief Mendez had strictly limited the amount of paint grenades on the field, though Douglas still had managed to swipe off several launchers for the grenades he picked off ‘killed’ markers.

Rounding out Red Team was Alice, whom Kelly remembered as an ace with weapons on full auto. Out of all of them, Alice’s accuracy with the SMGs on a full auto spit was incredibly steady, though her temperament was calm. However, she didn’t speak much and preferred to answer with either one word answers or just a yes-no nod-shake of her head.

“…so as soon as we’re done cleaning up the Elites, there’s Sergeant Forge, stabbing a combat blade into the Elite’s face before taking the energy sword and ramming it straight into its guts,” Douglas was saying as he described what had happened to them during their time in the shipyard Shield World.

“And the blade didn’t break?” Tom asked, slightly skeptical.

Douglas shook his head, “Stabbed it right where the armor doesn’t cover the eye socket.”

“I wonder how the Elites feel every single time someone manages to kill them with a simple piece of metal,” Linda muttered as she started to assemble the cleaned sniper rifles.

There was a collective feeling of amusement that settled around them as they continued their tasks, one that most of them had not felt in a long time. “Chief Mendez…wow…” Alice muttered after a few minutes of silence.

“Does that mean Section Zero controls Section Three?” Jerome asked.

Linda shrugged, and Kelly said, “Theoretically, they don’t exist, but Lieutenant Hattersfield is the captain of this vessel…” A slight frown of worry creased Red Team’s faces and she said, “They’re shadows, but they’re still Spartans.”

Silence fell on them again as Red Team returned to their work, but it was broken when Tom asked, “Jerome, what are you writing on the Laser?”

Jerome merely finished etching with a small bottle of white paint that had unexpectedly ended up in the calibration case for the Spartan Laser, before looking up. Kelly saw the letters F-T-W etched near where the model number and make-name of the Laser was. Sensing their confusion, Jerome merely said, “For-the-win. When we get back to Earth and kick the Covenant’s asses, this little one will be right there with every one of us.”

“Sergeant Forge named his combat blade ‘Lucy’,” Douglas quipped.

“Lieutenant Hattersfield named her combat blade ‘Vera’,” Linda said.

“Mine has a cooler name and can make things explode,” Jerome groused a bit and returned to calibrating the weapon.

Kelly saw Lucy grin a bit, clearly amused, before the young Spartan returned to cleaning the assault rifle she had in her hands.

The slight _whoosh_ sound of the door opening to a presence alerted everyone, and a cascade of assembled rifles and pistols were immediately leveled at the entrance, with the exception of Jerome, who had the Spartan Laser calmly pointed at the entrance. Ash poked his head in and immediately muttered, “I should’ve written a sign and stuck it on my forehead that says ‘shoot me, I’m target practice’.”

The weapons were immediately lowered as Ash stepped in and the door closed behind him. He said, “Chief Mendez and the others have finished the inventory of our supplies…and they’re distributing a mixed meal right now. I think they used Dr. Mosely’s mini laser cutter to make some plates and utensils of some sort…”

“Dinner is served…awesome,” Mark quipped; placing the magnum rounds he was inspecting down, as the rest cleaned and tidied up their respective sections.

Kelly took a quick inventory of how much they had and was pleased by the amount. Though they still had a lot more to go through and clean, she was satisfied at the number of weapons and ammunition they had – enough to garrison a fort for a good while. That was at least some good news besides the recovery of Red Team that she could report to Fred, who in her opinion, looked like he needed a healthy dose of good news.

With Ash in the lead as they made their way down to where the Chief and the Marines were, only to find that they had set up the small chamber into a sort-of mess hall, complete with a kitchen area. Drs. Mosely and Solev, along with the research assistant, Neil Rousseau, were already there, sitting on what looked like laser scalpel-halved table-structures to create benches. Several of the Marines were also sitting at the tables, though Kelly saw both Jake and Fred sitting at the other end where the Marines sat. There was no sign of Captain Cutter, Leigh, Dr. Halsey, or Dr. Reinhart and she surmised that they were still in the holo-chamber or the bridge.

As soon as she got her plate of mixed MREs packet contents, she sat down next to Fred and said, “Good news. We have enough ammunition and explosives to garrison the fort for one week if the assault is continuous.”

She saw the corner of Fred’s lips quirk up slightly before he resumed his meal. Rarely did any of them have anything to smile about anymore, but for now, she was satisfied that she had made her commander’s day.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 2115 hours, November 24, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

“It’s so nice to be out of that confining shell,” Serina quipped in their ears as she instantly accessed BROADCOM the moment she was transferred to the Forerunner systems. “Oh, hello. Jerrod, I presume?”

The other AI said nothing and Dr. Halsey said, “Serina, diagnostic report, please.”

“One moment, doctor,” the AI replied and after a pause, said, “Full functionality and operational capabilities established. Jerrod is giving me updates to Covenant and Forerunner translations, along with everything that has been going on since twenty-five-thirty-one. You call those creepy, parasitic organisms Flood. Interesting. Onyx Shield World compressed within a Slipspace field. Very interesting. The star maps you’ve accessed here seem similar to what Professor Anders has accessed in the north polar ruins on Harvest, though I do not recognize any of the systems… It will take some time, but if this is indeed the Librae Tauri system, then I can try to extract the previous jumps including the start point and try to triangulate a rough estimate of where our colonies are.”

“Do it, Serina,” Captain Cutter said, “and please help Jerrod with the scanning.”

“Captain,” Serina answered in a slightly condescending voice, “I have to agree with Jerrod…I don’t even know if what we’re using qualifies as a scanner… but it will be done.”

“Doctor Halsey,” the captain said, turning a bit and offering a handshake, to which the doctor took it, “Thank you.”

Leigh pushed back slightly from the console she was leaning on, her nervousness eased a bit with the AI secured and established in the ship’s systems with no problems. Dr. Halsey had done a marvelous job and had made good on the time she had promised that it would take to diagnose the AI’s potential Rampancy. There had been a small change of command ceremony earlier in the day in which Captain Cutter had officially taken the reigns of commanding the ship from her. His first order of business was to immediately promote her to a full Lieutenant, thereby establishing a solid chain of command, making her the executive officer of the vessel. She had been and still was not happy about that, but she had accepted it without protest.

“Captain…Lieutenant Hattersfield…perhaps you should take a look at this,” Serina said, except instead of over the speakers, it was now over external speakers that she had managed to access.

A hologram flickered to life next to the structural schematic of the Forerunner vessel as Leigh removed her helmet and hooked it to her waist. She stared at the diagram for a moment with all its rippling waves that seemed to be at mid-level, with the exception of a dip that was near the right side of the hologram. “What are we looking at, Serina?” she asked.

“If the translational algorithms are correct, then this is the distributed power usage for all systems aboard this vessel,” Serina said.

“Of course they’re correct,” Jerrod interjected, sounding a bit huffy.

“Play nice, you two,” she said, shaking her head a bit in exasperation before giving Jake a pointed look down the console table when she heard him snort a bit in amusement.

“What’s the dip in this corner?” Captain Cutter asked, gesturing to hologram’s point where the slightly moving wave was low.

“That’s the weapons system,” Serina replied. “The rest are life support, thermal and radiological protection…and yes Captain, we are quite protected from the radiation in this asteroid field. We also have readings for COM systems, shields, attitude control, which is strangely not tied to the propulsive eff-tee-el system, and a completely separate system for electrical and mechanics, which I believe is associated with the locking and unlocking of the doors. All chambers and corridors are modules in themselves and can be individually depressed if need be.”

“Can you control any of these things?” the captain asked.

“No,” Serina replied, “but we are…working to see if overrides can be established for some of the systems.”

“How much more sustainable firepower can we produce?” Leigh asked.

“Unknown, ma’am,” Jerrod spoke up. “At the rate that was fired last time, perhaps only that much.”

“That was only for a scouting party,” she muttered. This was not a good situation to be in, and without—“Is there a way to recharge those weapons?”

“Wait a moment,” Serina said. Several seconds later, there was a slight sound that was similar to a frustrated noise and she said, “Your translational algorithms are incorrect, Jerrod.”

“No access then,” Captain Cutter said before yet another snip between the two AIs could ensue. “How much power do we consume each time we jump?”

“Five percent of allotted power,” Jerrod said.

“Allotted?” the captain asked, puzzled

“We are unable to divert other distributed powers to the propulsive jump engines, sir,” Serina answered. “At least not yet.”

“All right,” Captain Cutter said, nodding, “work on it.”

“Serina,” Leigh asked, “You did say that there were shields?”

“Yes. Also currently non-accessible,” the AI stated.

“Which console can access it?”

“That one,” Serina said, and on the far side of the chamber, one of the consoles that had been the pet project of Neil Rousseau to try to activate and translate, was powered on. Fred walked from the main console to the new one, took a look at it and placed a gaunleted hand on one of the lit up indents on the console. A slight shudder rippled through the ship and Serina said, “Shields are active, though it seems that they’ve conformed to the shielding type that is present on your armor, Spartan-one-zero-four. But we are now protected to an extent from any nasty little bugger that tries to shoot at us.”

“So the ship adapts?” Captain Cutter asked, placing a hand on his chin, frowning a bit.

“Weapons and propulsive jump systems work only when the ship ‘senses’ blood,” Jerrod stated. “It could be a deterrent against Flood-control.”

“Ingenious system,” the captain muttered. “I wonder if the Covenant knew that.”

“Probably not, since they’ve branded us all as heretics to the holy blah blah blah,” Serina quipped.

“Give me an estimate on how long the scanning will take to complete, Serina,” the captain asked.

“If both Jerrod and I work on it and do not devote processing power to translations, then about six hours, sir,” the AI stated.

“I rewrote some of your base code,” Dr. Halsey spoke up, “are you encountering the same expansion problem that Jerrod has?”

“I…don’t know,” the AI replied, a trace of uncertainty in her voice. “Maybe.”

Dr. Halsey sighed a bit before pushing her glasses up a bit on the bridge of her nose and gripped her laptop a bit tighter. “Connect to my laptop after you’re done with the scans, Serina…I’ll see if I can take a look at what’s wrong.”

“Will do, ma’am,” the AI replied.

“Six hours,” Captain Cutter stated. He nodded to Jake and Fred, saying, “Creighton and Spartan-one-zero-four, take some downtime. Hattersfield, please stay for a bit. Doctor Halsey, thank you for all your hard work.”

Both Jake and Fred crisply saluted the captain before they left while Dr. Halsey merely gave a slight nod of her head before leaving. Only Captain Cutter and Leigh remained in the holo-chamber and after a few minutes, the captain clasped his hands behind his back and stated, “You’re not ONI Section One, Lieutenant. Your behavior around Serina gave you away that you’re ONI-affiliated. I’ve seen too many spooks in my life time to know how cautious they act when they give information and withhold it.”

“No, you’re right, Captain,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as possible. “I’m ONI, but affiliated with NavSpecWep.” That was half a truth in itself, since Section Zero was tied to a lot of ONI and UNSC programs. She did not want Captain Cutter to know anything of Section Zero, mainly because he was pure UNSC Navy personnel who did not have the authorization or clearance to know such secrets. “Is it a problem, sir?”

“No,” the Captain replied, “I just like to get to know those on my staff. If I may ask, how long have you known Lieutenant Junior Grade Creighton?”

“The Lieutenant and I have known each other since Basic, sir,” she replied, though truthfully, she had known Jake since they were children.

“Enlisted then to oh-cee-es…I reviewed your cee-es-vee and it’s very commendable. You weren’t there during the Battle of Reach, were you?”

“No, sir,” she said. “I was on assignment.”

The captain nodded and was silent for a few long moments before saying, “What can you tell me about the crew?”

“Sir, the Marines were under my command and they all have less-than-stellar records, due to counts of gross misdemeanor. They were pulled out of the battlefield by ONI for my assignment,” she explained. “I have two crack shot teams of sniper-spotter pairs. The Spartans are what they are Captain, and I believe it is safe for me to say that you know their capabilities as well as I do.”

“Some of them look like children, Lieutenant.”

“They may, but I have seen them in combat. Don’t let appearances fool you, sir,” she said, hoping that Captain Cutter would not press the issue.

“I’d like to get to know them a bit better, Lieutenant. Do I have permission?”

“Sir, Spartan-one-zero-four is their commanding officer. Perhaps you should ask him,” she said.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. You’re dismissed. Get some sleep. You look like you need it,” the captain said.

“Are you sure sir?” she asked, even though she knew that she had not slept in the past fourty-eight hours.

“Get some sleep,” the captain repeated.

“Yes, sir,” she said, saluted and left, heading towards the bio-stasis room, the quietest place that was on the ship. They had no areas where bunks could be arranged, so all of them slept where they could, but she did not want to disturb her Marines or the Spartans, especially now that she was considered a full bridge officer. That meant that she had to keep her distance, even if she did miss the quiet conversations she had had with a few of the Spartans. That distance she had to maintain now included Jake, which she now had to get used to not having her best friend right next to her in every decision she made anymore. She didn’t resent leadership, she just didn’t like how complicated it got as the chain of command was ascended.

However, when she entered the bio-stasis room, she found Jake standing near one of the survivors of the _Spirit of Fire_ , while Dr. Yelchin was near one of the Marines, checking the bio-signs with a small scanner. She approached her friend and he turned around, and gestured for her to come closer. The person he was standing next to was Professor Anders, though in the dimmed light, it looked like the professor’s freezer-burned skin was healing quite nicely.

“Did I ever tell you that I had a sister?” Jake whispered.

She raised an eyebrow, surprised. What had brought this on, she didn’t know, but it intrigued her slightly. She knew that Jake knew that Chief Mendez was her father, but Jake never did talk much about his family. All she knew was that his parents had agreed to the experimentations to ensure that ORION could be further developed.

“Well, half-sister…on my mother’s side,” he admitted. “I never really knew Ellen, since she was born about five years before I was, but she knew about me…though I don’t believe that she knew about Section Zero. When we enlisted, mom sent me a message to keep an eye out for a ‘Ellen Anders’, if we should ever meet. Ellen wasn’t fond of ONI, due to mom’s work, but the last I heard was that she had been recruited because of her xenobiological research. I thought she was dead when _Spirit of Fire_ was declared ‘lost with all hands’…had to tell mom that news…but now with Reach gone, I can’t tell her that Ellen’s alive…”

Leigh didn’t know what to say or how to respond, so the only thing she knew that could convey what she thought was to place a comforting hand on her best friend’s shoulder. “She’s safe now, Jake. That’s all that matters.”

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 0330 hours, November 25, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

“You’re in luck, Captain,” Serina said as soon as the four of them gathered around main holographic star system projection. “We have identified something that could possibly match the description that Lieutenant Hattersfield gave us, regarding the former rebel base.”

Fred wasn’t superstitious, but it sounded too good to be true – had luck finally turned to their side? As far as operations and missions went, this one had the most snags that he had ever encountered. Too many unknowns and too many things that they could not account for, but they had coped well, at least he saw that his Spartans had. Jerome, Douglas, and Alice were in good spirits considering the circumstances, but it seemed that they were as eager, to see what other clues this Forerunner ship would yield. He was glad that his Spartans were able to joke and enjoy the downtime they had.

“What do we have, Serina?” Captain Cutter said as the star map wavered and faded a bit as another hologram popped up, and displayed a close-up of a few asteroids that were quite oddly shaped. One of them had what looked like a partial piece of antenna sticking out, but from his viewing angle, he couldn’t tell if it was an antenna or just another piece of the asteroid.

“One lumpy composite asteroid that contains Corsica-carbide and titanium, with a completely exposed ten-meter diameter section made out of solid lead, one meter thick. It’s a semi-hollow asteroid if I point the ‘scanner’ at the lead,” Serina proudly said.

“No sign of tethers or the shield asteroids,” Jerrod said. “This asteroid is about twenty-million kilometers away from us. I’d advise not to jump, though we are working on trying to unlock the thrusters.”

“So you’ve got the console activated?” Lieutenant Hattersfield asked.

“Not quite yet, ma’am,” Serina replied. “Tricky translations. I estimate another day though, if the others continue with their external translations at a good pace. I say that we work at a better pace when the little buggers aren’t trying to kill us.” In a more conversational tone, she asked, “So, Captain, planning to blow the asteroid field and us into smithereens?”

“Serina,” the captain said, irritated and exasperated.

For a smart AI, Fred found her personality slightly similar to Cortana, except that this AI certainly had more of a bitingly sarcastic nature than Cortana did when she had been aboard the _Ascendant Justice_. She also seemed to have a sense of dark humor, something that Cortana didn’t have, but he wasn’t sure if it was because of what she had experienced or the fact that she was sharing spaces with another AI. Since the two had been placed together, Jerrod had also become a bit more easily irritated and for most of the time, had an annoyed tone in his voice. She was certainly one of the strangest AI he ever encountered.

“What?” the AI replied, “You can’t have a rebel base without nukes.”

“Actually, I was counting on the possibility of that,” Lieutenant Hattersfield quietly said.

“Oh good--” Serina started, but was cut off as Captain Cutter asked, “What did you have in mind, Hattersfield?”

“It depends on what type of nuclear weapons, if there are any at all on that asteroid, and how many we have. When the cartel was cleared out, three Variant-Vaccum HAVOK warheads were left behind, but ONI may have shipped them back out into the front lines when they fled from the Covenant. There were also several FENRIS warheads and Shiva missiles.” she replied.

“ _Three_ HAVOKs?” the captain said, mouth slightly agape.

Fred frowned a little. It was almost impossible for non-military persons to steal nuclear devices from under the UNSC noses, unless there was a traitor among them, similar to Colonel Robert Watts, whom the Spartans had captured back in 2525. Even then, he remembered that when Blue Team had been sent to Victoria in 2531 to recover weapons and kill any rebel leaders. The rebels had possessed three FENRIS warheads. They could have theoretically been smuggled by traitors or now, may have had come from the cartel out in the rim in a previous shipment.

“Your guess is as good as ours, captain,” Jake spoke up, shrugging a bit. “We don’t know where the Insurrectionists acquired the HAVOKs. The unfortunate loss of the cartel leader and his subordinates was something that couldn’t be avoided.”

Captain Cutter nodded and Lieutenant Hattersfield continued, “We’ve seen the Covenant die rather than touch a fully loaded Human weapon, but details about how the listening post personnel evacuated are sketchy. If they had successfully enacted the Cole Protocol, then we wouldn’t have found the base, so it can be safely assumed that a part of the Protocol was enacted, seeing how long it took the Covenant to blaze their warpath. Theoretically, if we can mine the field with the nuclear weapons and call in the Sentinels, we may be able to destroy them all. But that’s hinging on a lot of ‘what-ifs’. Textbook distress signal strategy plan, sir.”

“Indeed it is,” Captain Cutter agreed. “They still teach it at oh-cee-es then. Barring the worst-case scenario that yields nothing on that rock, I want the three of you to rip apart that plan and give me options.”

“Yes, sir,” Fred, Jake, and Lieutenant Hattersfield said at the same time.

“Serina, Jerrod,” the captain said, “Double-time those translations. I’ll be back in three hours. I have a few questions for the spooks.”

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1830 hours, November 25, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

Twelve hours and a lot of muttered curses from the scientists later, they finally unlocked the attitude control mechanism, enabling them to slowly move towards the asteroid. Three hours after that, they were nearing the asteroid. Jake was at the controls, slowly piloting the ship through the impacted asteroids debris field which were bouncing off the shields, slightly draining them a bit each time one struck. The larger ones were spaced a few hundred-thousand kilometers apart that they did not have to worry about them. When he had first tried to pilot the vessel, they had moved backwards, and he just merely flipped the datapad upside down. Leigh had heard his grumbling about how one of the scientists had gotten the inversion backwards, though.

Piloting the ship was strange, when Leigh had taken a look at how it was exactly done. A slot about mid-height had opened up, revealing an open rectangular slot, big enough to fit at least three fists, and long enough to encase the entire arm-and-a-half. Right now though, Jake only had half his arms in there. Forward, backwards, up-down, side-to-side, yaw, pitch, roll were controlled by the hands. Open palms indicated the three degree-of-freedom motion of forward-backwards, up-down, side-to-side, with the fine tuning and acceleration dependent on where exactly the hand was inside the rectangular box. A fist indicated the pitch, yaw, and roll motions with the same parameters as the open palms. At least that’s how she interpreted all the scientists’ words.

Currently though, she was standing near the console with the structural map and the power levels displayed. They had boosted the ship up a bit from the radiation field to align the only airlock they had access to with The yellow dots in the lower decks had not moved yet and were still inert, but she still did not breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Captain Cutter was at the main star map, watching the approaching asteroid get closer as Serina pointed the ‘scanner’ towards it. He was also guiding Jake on maneuvers to align the ship in a proper position where they could possibly hard dock. Fred was at the console where they had activated the shields, monitoring it, though Dr. Mosely had determined that it may possibly also be an engineering station.

“Three-quarters reverse, Creighton,” the captain said.

“Answering three-quarters reverse, aye sir,” Jake replied, drawing almost his entire arm out until only his fingertips were inside the rectangular box.

“Hard dock in five…four…three…two…one. All stop.”

There was a noticeable shudder that ran through the ship as it gently bumped the asteroid and stayed there. “All stop,” Jake echoed, releasing his hands from the controls and stepped back.

“So,” Serina piped up, “who’s up for a little adventure on this lump of rock?”

 

Weapons were calmly pointed out of the airlock as the Spartans watched Jake drift towards a corner of the enormous door and flip open an access panel that was miraculously still working and attached a datapad. Moments later, Fred saw a shudder that shook fine particles of dust from the asteroid and the door, from the door as the many decade old mechanism tried to respond to the request to open. After about a minute of shuddering and most likely grinding of the mechanisms that was unheard in the soundless environment of space, it finally started to open. However, it stopped about a third of the way and would not continue.

“That’s it; I think the door’s jammed beyond that point, though I think we can still close it. Might want to bring that beam with us though, if we can’t get out,” Jake said over TEAMCOM. Over BROADCOM, Fred heard, “Be advised Captain, we’re going to have to close the main door in order to access the inner section. It’s a built-in safety mechanism that was leftover from ONI protocols. We may lose COM.”

“Copy Lieutenant,” Captain Cutter said. “Good hunting.”

As Jake drifted in through the opening, Fred signaled for the rest of the Spartans to go, and he pushed off from the edge of gravity to null-gravity, feeling the sensation of nausea sweep over him. “Keep your legs straight and together,” he said over TEAMCOM. “Use hand movements if necessary to adjust course.”

Eleven winks of green flashed over his HUD as the Spartans made their way to the opening. Fred had not wanted to bring the entire team into the asteroid, but Lieutenant Hattersfield and Jake had drawn out a rough schematic of the place, trying to remember how it looked like the last time they had seen the base. For the size of the asteroid, it was quite an enormous base, with several levels that could not be covered in a fast amount of time with just a three-man team.

They landed without incident and magnetized their boots so they adhered to the inside. Jake was already typing away at the keypad on the inside and moments later, the door shuddered again and slowly closed, plunging them in complete darkness. However, there was also an audible hissing sound as the air hissed back in to fill the vacuum, and the screech of an inner set of doors was heard as it opened. Headlamps flickered on and swept all over the place, which was an enormous chamber with a set of doors at the end, which was about a third of a kilometer away.

“The air recycling system is still working,” Jake said over TEAMCOM. “That’s odd. Keep your tanks on, three-point-zeroes. I don’t like this.”

Unease filled the pit of Fred’s stomach as he gestured for Kelly to take point while he, Lucy, Ash, and Jerome fanned out to the sides, covering the enormous chamber. The rest fell behind while Jake hung to the right, seemingly searching for something. They cautiously moved forward, but there was nothing jumping out from the shadows as their lamplights passed through crevices that contained junk machinery and wires. Nothing was also showing up on Fred’s tracker except for his teammates.

Kelly suddenly held up a fist, about five meters ahead of everyone else and they all halted. She took a cautious step forward and then shifted her weight a bit, except instead of the reactionary force he expected for the magnetized boots to give way to null-gravity, it looked as if she were in regular gravity.

“Sirs, there’s artificial gravity here,” she said over TEAMCOM.

Jake drifted over to where she was and immediately landed quite hard on the metal deck as soon as he passed the threshold between null gravity and gravity. “Earth norm,” he murmured, as they continued to track the chamber. “There’s got to be a panel here somewhere.”

Fred gestured for the rest of the team to move forward to the section with gravity and as they did, he saw Mark drift over to one of the piles of debris, shining his headlamp into it. A clutter of wires, old plates, and other unidentifiable things were brushed off and fell into the gravity field with an audible clunk, while some of it drifted into the non-gravity side. “Sir,” Mark said over TEAMCOM, “I think this may be an access panel.”

“Not quite what I was looking for, but it will do,” Jake said over TEAMCOM as he hurried over and inserted the datapad he had into a port. Dim lights flickered for a moment before turning on, making it a bit easier to see just how large this bay was. A moment later, Jake hissed over TEAMCOM, “Covenant. Great.”

The unease turned into worry in Fred’s stomach. If there were Covenant forces roaming around in this supposedly abandoned base, then why had they not visually seen any ships or detected their heat signatures? More pressing yet was exactly how far were they from a Covenant staging ground? But his worry subsided a bit when he heard Jake’s assessment over TEAMCOM.

“Well, they left their stuff here, but this place has been abandoned for a long time. No trace of toxic gases in the air. They came, they saw, they left and did not change the security settings throughout the base. It’s going to take some time for me to unlock all the doors with manual overrides…but I think I can get this place semi-operational.”

There was a screech of metal being dragged across metal and all of them except for Jake, swung their rifles in the direction in which the sound had come from. In the far corner of the chamber, a metal door had slid open about three-quarters of the way, but nothing was emerging from it. However, it was quite dark in the inside.

“Blue-four,-five, stay with Jake. If anything comes through that door that’s not human, shoot first, ask later,” Fred ordered. Even if Jake had said that there was no sign of the Covenant left, he didn’t trust the readings until he was sure the base was clear.

“Wilco,” Tom replied, while Lucy merely flash a green wink of acknowledgement.

The rest of them approached the door and though there was still nothing on their trackers, Fred let his rifle peek through first before he stepped through and slipped to the side. He panned his lamplight around, but it was empty, save for dusty chairs and other odds and ends that were scattered throughout the place. He flashed the clear signal and the others melted through, though Ash, Olivia, and Mark had activated their reflective panels, making it hard for a visual confirmation.

As they piled into the room, their combined lamplights showed that there were several corridors that led to this main room. Calling up the rough schematic of the place, he dropped a nav marker for this main room. “Blue-six, take –seven and –eight head left. Red Team, take the north corridor. We’re going to take the right. If you come to a dead end or a door that won’t open, drop a marker and head back for the other corridors,” he told them. “Go silent.”

Eight winks acknowledged his orders and they fanned out. In this utter darkness only illuminated by their headlamps, Fred hoped that it was truly abandoned by the Covenant, or else they were going to have some serious trouble with the possibility of cloaked Elites. Worse yet, if there were Hunters or Brutes, then the cramped corridors would be a death trap for any of them. In all the rebel bases that he had stormed with the rest of Blue Team before they had become solely focused on the Covenant invasion, never had he encountered such cramped corridors. Ironically he felt very claustrophobic as he, Kelly, and Linda wound their way through, and he didn’t like it at all.

As he and the two others turned a corner, a long corridor opened up before them, containing several alcoves that most likely led into other chambers. He slowed down and pressed himself along the wall of the first alcove on the left until he got to the edge. Nothing showed up on his tracker and he could also hear nothing coming through his external speakers. He waved his hand and Kelly darted to the other side, before he could even blink. Linda took up position and both he and Kelly let their lamplights shine into the dark alcove, revealing an empty chamber.

He cautiously stepped in with Kelly melting behind him as he looked around, seeing dust float everywhere he walked, kicked up from the many paraphernalia that was littered all over the floor. Wiring and knocked over cabinets, along with crushed datapads and CPUs were also hanging from the ceiling and ripped out from the walls. What looked like the skeletal remains of someone with a crushed skull that was barely recognizable as human was lying haphazardly along one of the chamber’s walls

The chamber told him all he needed to know – ONI personnel had hastily evacuated the place, while trying to enact the Cole Protocol, but not all of them had made it out. However, he saw out of the corner of his eyes, Kelly making a short wave of her hand, indicating that she had found something. He walked over and she pushed over a fallen metal shelf and scattered the wiring that covered the floor with her boot. Both of their headlamps shined downwards, revealing a small metallic case marked ANZRA-098-14398-V-024.

Fred suppressed a whistle of surprise. The initial five-letter designation on the case indicated that this box was from the colony of Peloponnesus, one of the inner colonies’ weapons research and development centers. Everything that the R&D center did was extremely experimental and also dangerous. But it looked like the box had not been touched at all – typical Covenant mentality. However, there was a small keypad one of the sides and he knew that they would have to see if any of the ONI personnel could open it, if it still worked.

He dropped a small red marker on the schematic and left the chamber. This time, Linda took point and he followed. The other alcoves down the long corridor yielded nothing but dust and debris in the chambers, though there was not another skeleton in any of the other places. However the next partial door they stepped through yielded a fairly large chamber, about a quarter of the size of the one they had initially entered into the base. There was also an overwhelming smell of death and decay.

The place looked like someone had stormed it and let loose several explosives, judging from the residual dents and dusty shards when they cautiously walked over the floor. However, there were also plenty of evidence that the Covenant had been in this area; iridescent shards of purplish-blue pieces were littered all over the floor, and there were half-broken Covenant weapons pods, along with what looked like the skeletal remains of a Ghost. The only thing that was out of place was the fact that there were no bullet holes that peppered the debris – everything looked like it was shattered from plasma rounds or sticky grenades.

There was still no movement on Fred’s tracker and even with his aural sensors boosted to maximum, nothing was whispering from the shadows. He panned his lamplight towards a darkened corner and immediately froze his rifle right where he saw the lump. Kelly was immediately by his side, lamplight also pointed towards the corner, shotgun ready, while Linda melted into the shadows cast by their lamplights, having flicked hers off.

The enormous hulking lump in the corner had the sheen of what looked like blue-ish armor with pale, rotted guts that could be taken for the exposed section of what used to be orange eel-like structure. The Hunter had clearly been decaying for quite some time now, but the skeletal remains and the near-impenetrable armor was still defining its shape. It looked like underneath the Hunter was another one, most likely the second of the pair. Those two decomposing bodies were the source of the awful smell, but as Fred stepped closer, closing off his external air filters and letting better-smelling recycled air circulate through, he noted that there were no bullet pings off the armor. From what he could tell, it looked like the Hunters were killed by Covenant weapons.

He gestured for them to keep going, as he turned away, activated his external air filters and pushed further into the chamber and out to another cramped corridor. This corridor had splatters and trails of dried blood, and it didn’t look like the red-turned-black-with-time of Human blood. It looked deep violet. As the three of them cleared and searched through the chambers located in this corridor, there were more dead Covenant bodies, some of which Fred couldn’t even identify, having been rotted to the point where the skeletal remains were mixed with other decomposing bodies.

Several more locked boxes that hadn’t been touched by the Covenant were also found, and nav markers were dropped on the schematic diagram. There was another Human skeleton found, but it was barely recognizable, having been nearly crushed and almost grounded to fine dust by the heavy safe it was found under, with only a portion of the skull and a few finger bones remaining.

Fred, Linda, and Kelly spent another hour cautiously working their way around doors bent inwards or blown off the hinges, cramped corridors, and chambers before they finally stopped at a dead end and could go no further. There was nothing that jumped from the shadows out at them, and no sign of life. By the time the three of them returned to the main chamber, Ash and his team were already back there. There was no sign of Red Team yet.

“Report,” he said, breaking COM silence as he rebooted the schematic diagram to display the updates that Ash and his team might have made on his HUD. He saw that Red Team had covered both the north corridor and the one directly next to it and were making their way through the north-eastern one. Ash and his team had covered the other two. The corridor that he, Kelly, and Linda had covered was by far the longest one.

“First corridor led to a dead end, but there are a few chambers with dead Covenant, sir,” Ash said. “Second corridor we took led to an elevator shaft that I think is capable of fitting at least three Warthogs with some room to spare, though I think the corridor leading to this place can only fit one and a half. The electronics don’t work, but we managed to get a manual crank working. Directly below us is a hangar bay full of half-broken machinery, Longswords, and other spacecrafts. There were however, eight strange-looking spacecrafts that may be undamaged, but they’re stuck under a few I-beams and T-beams. We also found the skeletal remains of both Human and Covenant. One of them was near what looks like a deactivated HAVOK warhead, sir. There’s absolutely no sign of anyone alive down there.”

“We need to secure that warhead and see if a remote detonation sequence can be established from the ship,” Fred said. “Give me an uplink on the spacecrafts.”

A tiny image of what Ash saw through his HUD appeared on the corner of his HUD and the familiar outline of one of eight Open Frame 92/Extra-Vehicular Activity fighters trapped beneath crisscrosses of beams that had fallen from the side walls and ceiling, greeted him. “Booster Frames,” he stated. They appeared to be intact, but without the proper lighting in the place, he couldn’t confirm it to be so. The last time he had piloted one was when Blue Team, consisting of John, Kelly, Arthur, Solomon, and him, had been sent to recover a cryogenically frozen Dr. Halsey from Covenant hands.

Agile, and packed with tons of heavy ammunition, they were almost as powerful as Covenant Banshees, but lacked the tight maneuverability that the Covenant Seraphs had. He had flown a Seraph before, while escaping the scuttled Covenant ship when John and Dr. Halsey had managed to get into an escape pod, but with the unfamiliarity with the controls that Seraph had flown like a rock though at least they could shoot. Unfortunately, he didn’t know if the Booster Frames would be able to survive the irradiated environment they currently inhabited. “We’ll recover the Frames later, if possible,” he said, flicking the small image off.

Red Team emerged from the corner of the long corridor they had entered through, their headlamps shining down the length, alerting the rest of them to their presence. As soon as the three Spartans stopped, Fred rebooted the schematic again and this time, more markers including a marker that looked strangely like a smiley face appeared on his HUD. “Red-lead, sit rep,” he said.

“No contacts, sir,” Jerome answered, “Two locked crates that are marked with New Cyprus serial codes have been found though. Crates of ammunition also found. The remains of what looks like two Humans and multiple Covenant forces were also found scattered in some of the rooms. It looks like the majority of the Covenant forces were killed by their own weapons, sir.”

“What’s the smiley face?” he asked.

“HORNET mines, sir,” Douglas answered, barely keeping the excitement from his voice. “Two crate-full found untouched.”

This time, Fred let out a low whistle. At thirty-megaton yield each, a crate-full carried six mines each. They were stealthy and perfect for attaching and hiding within an asteroid field as an ambush. It was perfect for a crazy ambush and possible destruction of the Onyx Sentinels. They were also not the perfect munitions to possibly set off Covenant forces that may be near the system, given that none of them knew what the EMP-enhanced by the radiation field they were in would do to the Forerunner vessel.

“Secure all crates and that warhead,” he ordered.

“Roger,” a few of them said over TEAMCOM while the rest just winked their green light of acknowledgement.

“Be advised with the New Cyprus crates. They may be booby-trapped. Do not attempt to open upon recovery,” Jake’s voice cracked over TEAMCOM.

“Wilco,” Jerome answered.

As his Spartans scattered back into the dark corridors, there was a noticeable shudder throughout the place that lasted a few seconds before the visibility of the place started to brighten. Broken furniture, holes in the moldy walls, smashed consoles and shattered items told a portion of the story that had engulfed the place in the early years of the war. Fred lightly jogged back out into the enormous bay where he found it a bit brighter. Lucy and Tom were also at different activated consoles near the base’s port side, busy, but as soon as he entered, they looked up.

He gave them a nod of acknowledgement and stopped in front of Jake. “Sir,” he respectfully began, knowing that Jake, Lucy, and Tom had heard the reports. “We also found a crate that was marked ANZRA-zero-nine-eight-dash-one-four-three-nine-egith-dash-vee-dash-zero-two-four.”

“Peloponnesus?” Jake asked, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “I don’t have access codes to that and neither do any of the Section Zero scientists.” In a quieter tone, Jake wondered out loud, “Why would a listening post have something from Peloponnesus?” He shook his head slightly and said, “The New Cyprus crates are most likely leftover from the days of the cartel operations--”

“Sirs,” Kelly’s voice came over TEAMCOM, strained, “we can’t move the ANZRA-marked crate without the three of us lifting it. Corridor separators are too narrow for three to fit through. Whatever’s in this thing, it’s encased in a very thick shell of lead. Suggest that we leave it here for now.”

“Leave it,” Jake replied over TEAMCOM.

“Copy,” Kelly answered.

“Best to report back to the captain about the cache,” Jake said. “There are still plenty of corridors that have yet to be unlocked.

“Yes, sir,” he said and headed for the entrance.

 

~*~*~*~


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 0245 hours, November 27, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

Despite the cool, decay-tinged air that was circulating around the base, the atmosphere in the hangar bay where repairs were currently being made to the extracted Booster Frames was relatively light. At least that was the sense Leigh got the last time she had passed through the bay before making her way to this particular chamber. Captain Cutter had ordered the recovery of the Booster Frames. The marines recovered from the _Spirit of Fire_ had woken up only a day-and-a-half ago, as did Professor Anders, but now, a few of those Marines, her Marines, Chief Mendez, and a few of the Spartans were in the bay repairing the Frames. She saw the relief on several of the Marines’ faces as they joked and laughed with each other, glad to be off the ship. In a way, she was glad her self, because the atmosphere between the scientists, particularly between Professor Anders and Dr. Halsey had dipped to sub-zero whenever she was around them. It had felt as if nitroglycerin and napalm were almost ready to be unleashed, each time she was around the two scientists.

After a half-day futilely trying to disarm the booby-trapped New Cyprus crates, she had called it a bust and had it dumped out as unsalvageable. Now she was sitting in front of the secured crate from Peloponnesus with Dr. Mosely at the laptop hooked up to the wiring of the case, while Lucy was busy soldering the circuit board that had originally been connected to the small CPU attached to the case. Under the guidance Dr. Mosely, Lucy’s small fingers deftly repaired the circuit board along with several of the wirings of the tiny CPU. There were two access ports that needed to be decoded in order to open the crate.

Leigh currently had a datapad hooked up to the inert keypad and was cycling through the various algorithms she remembered that the Peloponnesus scientists had designed in order to create unique access codes for each crate they locked. Though the keypad had no power flowing through it, it was a unique design by Peloponnesus to create it as a membrane keyboard with enough memory in it to accept access codes at the event of a loss of its internal power. She herself had only been to the top secret facility once while Jake had never been there, but she had not received access codes to any of their materiel. Still, with what she saw and knew, she had been very impressed by the level of experimental technology the scientists had been developing.

Dr. Mosely was working on the other half of the access, dealing with more complex algorithms. While Dr. Halsey would have been the better choice for the access code development, Leigh knew that Dr. Mosely had spent one year in her illustrious but hidden career at Peloponnesus before transferring to the MJOLNIR Project due to ‘creative differences’. That made her more qualified than Dr. Halsey for this.

It had taken them the better part of a continuous ten-hour algorithm development and crunching session to come up with the twenty-letter access code for both access areas. However, now that the last digit was being calculated for the keypad, Lucy had finished her soldering and had replaced the circuit board back into the tiny CPU. The laptop hummed and Dr. Mosely hit a few keys while Lucy watched the screen with curious eyes.

“Cyrillic, Greek, English, and numerics,” Dr. Mosely muttered.

“Last digit for the keypad found, doctor,” she said as the datapad softly beeped its completion.

“Moment of truth,” the doctor said as Leigh input her twenty-digit code on the inert membrane keypad. When she finished and pressed the ‘ACK’ key, there was an audible click coming from the crate. Moments later, the scientist’s hands flew over the laptop’s keyboard as she input her twenty-digit code. As soon as she hit the ‘enter’, there was another click from the crate that was followed by a whirring noise, indicating that the internal gears that locked the thing were unlocking.

About a minute later, the noise stopped with a final click and Leigh tried to open the crate but grunted a bit with the effort. With help from Lucy, the two of them managed to pry the lid off to reveal the sole occupant serenely sitting in the middle of the crate surrounded by 1.5 meters-all-around lead. Encased in a small shell of lithium triteride armor smaller than its successor, Leigh recognized it as a precursor to the prototype NOVA Bomb that had only been recently developed. Judging from the size of the encasement, she estimated one or two most-likely experimental nuclear fusion warheads were packed inside it. There was a small alpha-numeric keypad on one end of it, but the tiny display below the keypad was non-active.

“Lieutenant,” she keyed TEAMCOM as she stuck her helmet back on and made sure that both Lucy and Dr. Mosely could hear her while she called for Fred. “Please inform Captain Cutter that the ANZRA crate contains a prototype to the NOVA bomb. Advise.”

There was a distinct pause of silence before she heard him reply, “Copy, ma’am.”

“Why would something like this be here?” the doctor whispered as the three of them stared at the small cylinder the length of an average arm with the width of a quarter meter. Such a small weapon had been theorized to have enough explosive power to equal that of a HAVOK warhead, except that its design was to enable the compression and explosive force in vacuum to yield at least nine to ten times that of a HAVOK, per warhead.

The COM cracked again and she heard Fred say, “Captain Cutter wants it secured, ma’am. A containment box is currently being constructed.”

“Copy,” she replied. That meant that Captain Cutter did not want to use the bomb just yet.

“Ma’am,” one of the Marines, Irina, said over TEAMCOM, “we also need some coils, please. I think they’re located a few chambers down from where you are, near the end of the corridor.”

“Wilco,” she replied. “Doctor Mosely will be there in a few minutes with the package.”

She clicked TEAMCOM off and Lucy turned to gather the EVA suit that the doctor had donned for the vaccum ride and shed as soon as she had begun her work here. Together they helped Dr. Mosely into the suit. Once the doctor was secured and both the datapad and her laptop was inside a storage pouch on the suit, Leigh gingerly hefted the inactive bomb and placed into the doctor’s arms. It wasn’t heavy, but it was a bit bulky, though the doctor managed to get a good grip on it before she left.

“Let’s go,” she said to Lucy on a private single-beam COM. “Time to go shopping for coils.”

Even with the lighting in this place working somewhat, though there were spots where it was completely dark, she still kept her shotgun out. She remembered how the corridors and chambers looked all those years ago, and the current state of mess it was in didn’t add anything to her memories. Each chamber that she, Jake, and Eryn had stormed during the days of the cartel rule had been fought inch-for-inch. They even had the vents booby-trapped, forcing them to storm by foot.

She shook her head a bit, clearing the memories and the echoes of the screams of the dying as the two of them entered a chamber near the end of the corridor. The coils that the others were looking for were lying haphazardly in the corner of the chamber, partially covered by some paraphernalia. Lucy slung her rifle over her shoulder as she crouched and brushed the dust and debris off, hefted one, and inspected it as her headlamp illuminated it.

Leigh kept her hand on the shotgun while she hefted another coil and took a look at it. The ends were completely shattered and the wiring through it looked burnt. It was useless, so she tossed it behind her shoulder, hearing it shatter into millions of pieces. She saw Lucy set the coil she was inspecting gently down and pick up another one. However, when Leigh crouched down to pick up another coil from the floor; she froze as she saw _something_ flicker over her tracker on her HUD.

Lucy had froze too and as she quietly placed the coil down and drew her rifle from her back, whatever had flickered over Leigh’s tracker showed up again – except this time, a loud crash came directly from the entrance to the chamber as the ceiling collapsed, raining concrete, metal rods, and chunks of debris down on the two of them. There was an unmistakable bestial roar as the dust choked the air and all she could see was the fuzzy outline of a gigantic, bi-pedal monster towering over them, holding an enormous weapon.

She fired without thinking, punching as many shotgun rounds as she could into the beast while shouting over TEAMCOM, “Enemy contact, enemy contact!”

Even with Lucy unleashing a full clip at the beast on auto, the beast roared as it defected the bullets with its weapon, spraying the bullets all over the chamber. It charged and swung its weapon down towards Leigh, who ducked and rolled out of the incoming blow and was promptly thrown into the wall on the other side. She coughed blood, splattering the inside of her helmet as she felt something inside her body give way to the force of her impact. “Go!” she struggled to say to Lucy, who unloaded another half-clip at the beast before she scrambled up as fast as she could from where she had landed with the impact, and backed towards the entrance, giving Leigh time to recover and get up.

Leigh shunted the intense pain aside and willed herself to stand, while forcing her arms to cooperate and unload more rounds from her shotgun and into the creature. The beast, now that the debris and dust had clear after that strange impact attack from the enormous weapon it wielded, looked very emaciated, but had a snarl on its ugly, monkey-like face. Never had she seen such an enemy before, and it was tall – taller than any of the Spartans – towering a good two-and-a-half feet over her.

It swung its weapon down again in a diagonal arc, and this time, she ran. She cleared the door just as the strange weapon’s impact radius clipped her and sent her spinning. She felt Lucy grab her arm and forced her to stay upright, wrenching her shoulder. Together, they tore down the corridor, and with each step Leigh took, she felt a sloshing inside her body from something that was _not_ supposed to move. Breathing was excruciatingly painful, but she forced herself to draw breath as she ran. Her vision was fuzzy and she could still hear the beast’s roar as it pounded down the corridor after them.

Each step brought her closer to the main hangar bay of the place and to backup, but each step was matched for two or three steps by the creature as it barreled down towards them. She didn’t dare risk a look back and merely flipped her shotgun backwards and pulled the trigger once-twice-three-times. The guttural roar blasted her ears and as Lucy crossed the threshold between the cramped corridors and into the main bay, Leigh was right on her heels…so was the downwards swing of the beast’s weapon. The force of the impact slammed into her and Lucy as they both flew through the air. The last thing she saw was the metal, stain-covered wall of the bay before she slammed into it and fell into darkness.

 

The chatter from the Marines was supposed to be inaudible from where Fred was sitting, but augmentation had boosted his hearing enough so that he could hear a pin drop in a raging storm. So he had shut off his external audio inputs, enveloping him in a quiet field as he worked on the repairs to the Booster Frames. Scattered bits and pieces that were needed to fix the Frames were lying all around him while about a meter away from where he was sitting; Douglas and Kelly were welding the larger chunks together with the Sentinel beam as an improvised laser welder. Drawn up, old, outdated schematics that Dr. Mosely had kept in her personal files were used as a base to see what needed to be repaired, and so far, it had worked. She had also quickly taught them the basic welds that they needed to repair the Frames. Most of the damage done to the Frames had been external. A few of the Marines, Alice, and Chief Mendez were cutting sheets of metal with the tiny laser scalpel into the external forms of the Frames. The rest of the Marines, Mark, and he were wiring internal components together that needed to be fixed.

The doctor had left only a few seconds ago, carrying the prototype package with her. He had been surprised that such a weapon was located here and wondered about the purpose of it being here. However, it seemed even Section Zero had no idea why it was here.

His COM suddenly crackled and he heard the shouts of “Enemy contact, enemy contact!” His blood ran cold, but even before the repeat confirmation came though, he had already snatched up his rifle, dropping the piece he was repairing. Only Kelly was much faster, having her shotgun locked and loaded. Flicking on his external audio sensors, he listened carefully and felt a shudder through the ground, followed by a muffled roar. None of them had encountered _anything_ when they had scouted out the entire place, including the chambers and corridors that had been opened hours after they had secured their initial cache. Nothing had shown up on their trackers, and they had heard nothing. Even with the recent departure of Dr. Mosely back to the Forerunner vessel, they had received no COM transmission from the vessel regarding any enemy contacts or movements outside the asteroid.

A violent shudder ran through the structure, causing some of the Marines to crouch as they all looked warily around, though the rest kept their weapons pointed solely at the door. Whatever it was, it was coming towards them, judging from the multiple small shudders that ripped across the floor. He gestured for Alice and Mark to take one side of the door way while he and Douglas took the other side. They kept at least five meters before them as Kelly, the Marines, and Chief Mendez arrayed themselves near the center.

Another roar, this time guttural and distinct was heard and even before the short blast ended, he had flicked his rifle to full auto. Moments later, Lucy tore through the entrance, but before Lieutenant Hattersfield had even cleared the entrance, an enormous shockwave slammed into all of them, sending the Lieutenant and Lucy across the bay, and slamming both Fred and Douglas into the bay wall.

Fred saw stars as the back of his head slammed into his helmet and felt pain bloom around his left shoulder as something inside of him snapped, his ballistic gel layer unable to compensate for the force in which he smashed into the wall. He shook his head to clear it, just as the Brute lumbered into the bay, kicking a caved-in piece of the wall that had originally separated the interior of the place from the bay, away.

He held down the trigger of his rifle, dumping a full clip into the severely emaciated Brute that was wielding an enormous weapon that looked like a cross between an axe and a hammer. The blade of the weapon was at least half of the weapon’s length, and a box-like structure was directly mounted on the other side of the blade, near the end of it.

He saw that Kelly had narrowly avoided being blasted backwards when the strange weapon had ‘fired’, though some of the Marines weren’t so lucky and were lying haphazardly around the bay. The ugly beast angrily snarled as it swung its weapon in a broad arc, deflecting many of the bullets from them as it charged towards Alice and Mark, who had landed among one of the Booster Frames, shattering it to pieces. Just as the Brute raised its weapon, a hail of bullets peppered its back, causing it to convulse. Two combat blades sunk to their hilts into the Brute’s skull, thrown by Chief Mendez who had lost his weapon somewhere in the brief skirmish. The Brute bellowed again, but it was suddenly cut short as the multiple bullets in its body and blades in its skull finally registered. It collapsed, but the weapon was still active, though Kelly sprang and caught it and hefted it before it could hit the ground.

Fred hurried to where Lieutenant Hattersfield and Lucy had landed seeing their bio-signs both thready and very weak. They were lying crumpled on the ground, and he could see some blood already leaking out of parts where their armor had ruptured. They were not going to last long if medical attention was not immediately administered. Bio-signs for Kelly, Mark, Alice, and Douglas were elevated, though he saw multiple areas where portions of the small human-like figure on his HUD told him that they were also injured. However, they looked mobile, though Alice and Mark moved sluggishly. Chief Mendez’s bio-signs were severely elevated and near the red-level, but it was slowly subsiding as the adrenaline started to wear off. The Marines…two had snapped their necks from the force of the impact when they had landed on one of the Frames. The others had fared better, though they were clearly more injured than the Spartans.

“Spartans and Marines,” he barked over TEAMCOM, “Status!” Green lights from his Spartans winked back at him. Good. That meant no one was immobile. Three Marines winked green, Chief Mendez among them, while the rest flashed amber or red. He had to prioritize who would leave and who would stay. “Marines, get these two into EVA suits and get them back to the ship aye-sap. Injured go too. Chief, go with them and bring more suits back along with an override on a datapad. The rest of you, we need to clean the house.”

Those who were injured though mobile winked their acknowledgement.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 0900 hours, November 30, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

Dr. Halsey rubbed the bridge of her nose with the back of her wrist, alleviating the small headache she knew that was going to get worse as the day wore on. She had paused in fusing the ligaments of Fred’s torn left shoulder, mainly to give his body a bit of time to compensate before she could continue with the procedure. The bio-stasis room was extremely quiet, save for the hum of the strange machines that she had yet still not been able to decipher, and the two steady heartbeats of her two unconscious patients. She actually liked it. The only disappointing thing was the fact that there was no cup of coffee, just water for her to down.

Local anesthetic had been administered to the wound, though Fred held himself extremely still as she worked on the torn shoulder. He had not even turned his head a bit to see Tom entering an hour earlier, and had merely tracked the young Spartan with his eyes as Tom checked on Lucy for a moment before leaving. Such it was a testament of her work and she had felt an odd chill crawl down her spine.

She mentally sighed. She had not had the genetic files on Lucy; though with help from Dr. Reinhart and Dr. Yelchin, they had extracted and decoded enough of her DNA to flash clone a replacement lung for her partially collapsed lung. The internal bleeding that the psychologically mute Spartan had suffered had taken a long time to stop, and the fusing of some of the torn ligaments and muscles had just been completed only a few hours ago.

Stabilizing Lieutenant Hattersfield had been tough, for the ORION Project Spartan had to have her liver completely replaced, along with a collapsed lung. The amount of internal bleeding she had alone should have killed her, but both Dr. Reinhart and Dr. Yelchin had worked extremely quickly to repair the damage as best as possible. Fusing the lieutenant’s torn musculature system had been completed a half-day ago. It had been a harried one-and-a-half day for both Lucy and Lieutenant Hattersfield, but they were alive for now, though without blood packs, they were still unconscious, slowly recovering the blood they had lost.

Professor Anders had also stepped in to help relieve them at times, though she was mainly taking cues from the others, having no practical experience in medics. Dr. Halsey herself had tolerated the woman’s presence, mainly because by the time the professor had stepped in, she was bone-tired. Though as soon as Lucy and Lieutenant Hattersfield had been stabilized, Professor Anders left, though now was most likely on the asteroid, examining the Covenant bodies.

Dr. Halsey had heard snippets of what had gone on as soon as Chief Mendez, the injured Marines, and the two gravelly wounded Spartans, had arrived back on the ship, but her attempts to get answers from Captain Cutter and Lieutenant Creighton had been rebuffed. However, when things started to settle down, she finally got her answers and it had put a chill to her bones. Somehow, her Spartans and everyone that had been though the ONI listening post’s nook and cranny had missed the fact that there was a lone Covenant soldier roaming the premises. She knew the capabilities of her Spartans; she knew that they could clean out a rebel base with an unheard-of accuracy, but for them and the others to miss this one lone Brute was frightening. Her Spartans never missed, never left an enemy alive…so what had caused them to miss this one Covenant soldier?

That question had been haunting her since she found out about what had happened in the base. She had checked the food they were eating, and though the level of spiciness in some were higher than she anticipated, the food was normal. She had Jerrod check the air they were breathing, and he had confirmed it to be normal with no microscopic trace amounts of any foreign matter. She had also checked all her Spartans’ armors’ functionality, though that was done with a scan and input into her laptop rather than actual hardware check. It had been done when each of her Spartan had checked in for minor patching of their wounds sustained by the strange weapon that the Brute had wielded. She had even checked their bio-statuses. All were normal.

She had also gone through her memories of how her Spartans had behaved during the past few weeks, and though they were constantly on alert, their stress levels seemed normal during the times in which everyone was not jumping out of their skins. She had asked them a few questions pertaining to their own view of the attack during the times in which they had been in here, getting patched up, for she wanted a quick psychological assessment of their mental state. All of them had been shocked and confused as to how they had missed the soldier during their sweeps.

Lieutenant Creighton had scoured the vents in which there were still active booby traps, along with the ceiling area in which the Brute had crashed through, but had found nothing except for the scuff marks of the Brute crawling through an area that led to a chamber where a mass grave of Covenant bodies were found behind a triple three meter-thick dead-bolted door. A team of four EVA had also been sent out to scour the asteroid and they had found nothing. It seemed that the Brute had sustained itself for however many years it had been stuck in that base, feeding off the rotted and decaying bodies of its comrades. That and the active traps that could not be easily disarmed made it too dangerous for the junior lieutenant to go crawling through the rest of the labyrinth of vents without the proper equipment. And they did not have a lot of resources to spare to try to disarm the traps.

Dr. Halsey continued with her work and as soon as she finished fusing the torn ligaments and a few layers of the inner skin, she set the tool down and picked up the sterile medical needle to stitch the larger areas that couldn’t be properly fused without a full medical facility. She knew that all of them were very lucky to have saved the lives of the wounded without a proper medical facility with what field kits they had. But she couldn’t help but wonder how long would their luck hold?

Perhaps it had been a mistake for her to try to abscond the Spartans away to live and fight another day on Onyx. She shook her head slightly. No. Even with the possibility of bringing the Forerunner vessel back to UNSC-controlled space, what were the odds that the entire think-tank of the Human race could hope to unlock all the mysteries of the ship? In the near-month that they had been stuck on this ship, the translational algorithms had been re-written countless of times, and everything that they had unlocked had always counted on guesswork and a good stroke of luck.

The UNSC would never be able to utilize the full power of the Forerunner ship without having the ship over-run by Covenant and destroyed first or have the entirety of Humanity wiped out. In what little spare time she had had over the month, and since the recovery of Serina, she had gone over the logs that were stored in the AI and what the crew of the _Spirit of Fire_ had found in the shipyard Shield World was incredible. She had also grudgingly admitted to herself that it was only due to the fast-thinking of her former protégé, Ellen Anders, that they had destroyed the world before the Covenant could get their hands on the spacecrafts.

From Serina’s analysis of the Flood form found in the shipyard Shield World, and compared to those from Halo in Cortana’s analysis, if the Flood ever spread again, as she speculated they did when the Forerunners were still alive, then sentient life would be…well, to put it in rarely thought of coarse terms, screwed. It seemed to her that the only way the Forerunners thought to save the galaxy and themselves was the construction of Halo and the sister arrays. This meant there were more rings out there, waiting to be activated. Cortana’s logs indicated that the Monitor in charge of the construct had said that the premature deactivation of the array had put everything else on standby, which would explain the activation of the Sentinels on Onyx along with the Slipspace bubble that contained the Onyx Shield World. However, she had hypothesized that there were surely more Shield Worlds similar to Onyx, but she did not know if they were Flood-controlled similar to the shipyard Shield World. That was another puzzlement she had yet to work out…how did the shipyard Shield World become Flood-controlled?

The door to the bio-stasis room opened, bringing her out of her thoughts and she briefly glanced up from her careful stitching to see Dr. Reinhart walk in with a canteen of water in one hand. His other hand was curled over something tiny enough that she couldn’t see what it was and could only assume that it was a pill of some sorts, and he headed over towards where Lieutenant Hattersfield was lying. That caused her to frown.

“Doctor?” she asked as Dr. Reinhart placed the canteen and a small pill next to the unconscious lieutenant. “What are you giving my patient?” With what she had given Lieutenant Hattersfield in injections to stabilize her, and a few more under the recommendation of Dr. Reinhart himself, it was dangerous to give the lieutenant anymore drugs. She had not had the opportunity to try to crack into the files from the other scientists’ computers to see if there were any information on what was done to the augmented one-point-ones, but there were differences between the ORION Project Spartans and her Spartans. Some of the injections that Dr. Reinhart had recommended while they were trying to save the lieutenant’s life was against her better judgment, and even though in the past, the two of them had parted with unresolved differences, the patients were still under her care.

“Nothing you need to worry about, Catherine,” Dr. Reinhart replied. “It should not interfere with anything that is currently swimming around her bloodstream.”

“Should not,” she flatly stated, knotting one of the stitches she had finished and then cut the string off. She started stitching another section. “Lieutenant Hattersfield is not going to wake up any time soon, doctor.”

“On the contrary, I believe that she will be waking up soon. As close as they are in relation to Human genetics, the Bonobo chimpanzees experimented upon that Admiral Jeromi sent to you in his report cannot substitute for the real deal. The accelerated cellular regeneration in the one-point-ones is fast, Catherine, if not inhibited by pain killers,” Dr. Reinhart said.

“But such a regeneration carries the risk of killing the person,” she replied, keeping the anger from her voice. “She _should_ be receiving a morphine injection in…”

“Thirty minutes, ma’am,” Jerrod’s voice quietly came over the speakers to this chamber. “Thirty minutes for SPARTAN-bee-zero-nine-one.”

“They get intoxicated, Catherine,” Dr. Reinhart bluntly stated. “Pain killers intoxicate the one-point-ones. I assure you that I do no harm when it comes to them. However, to answer your question, I am merely giving Leigh a counter-drug for the side effects she had received after augmentation.”

Dr. Halsey’s frown got deeper, but she did not argue with him. She did not have the right to contradict what her former mentor did to the ORION Project Spartans after what she had done to her Spartans. She could only trust in what he knew. “How much did you ration for Lieutenant Creighton?” she asked.

“Enough,” was his cryptic reply. She thinned her lips in displeasure but did not press him for details. With the subroutine she had programmed into Jerrod and into Serina when she had taken a look at her base code, they should have created several access points into the Section Zero databases for her. The only problem was the lack of time she had.

“Fine,” she said, returning her attention to the stitching. Moments later, she finished up and set her tools down. She picked up the slightly unwieldy clamps and fitted the shoulder casing of Fred’s armor back onto him. “Try not to do any strenuous movements for the next couple of days, Lieutenant,” she told Fred.

“Noted, ma’am,” he replied. “Thank you.”

“Dr. Halsey, Dr. Reinhart,” Jerrod’s voice came back over the speakers in the chamber. “Professor Anders is requesting your presence up on the second deck in her laboratory.”

“Please let her know that I am busy, Jerrod,” she said, irritated, as she walked over to check on Lucy’s stats. She did not want to have anything to do with that woman, even if she had helped in the days prior.

“Unfortunately, ma’am, she insists,” Jerrod said. “I will remind you of the thirty minute mark if you would like to leave then.”

She sighed, “Fine then. Please have Dr. Yelchin attend to the patients.” To Fred, she said, “Lieutenant…Fred, please keep an eye on these two until Dr. Yelchin arrives.” She gestured to the small spread out medical instruments and injectors filled with liquid, along with the usual bandages, tourniquets, and other things from the medical kits that had been salvaged from the _Spirit of Fire_. “You should not need to utilize these.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Fred replied, giving both her and Dr. Reinhart a curt nod.

She studied him for a moment, before nodding and leaving with Dr. Reinhart. Despite the lack of emotion she saw on Fred’s face, she could still see it in his body language, however it might be concealed in the MJOLNIR armor. What had happened on that asteroid ate at him, and she knew that no matter what she said, what advice she could give, it was not going to assuage him. Her Spartans never let anyone close to them unless they were already a part of the team, not even her. She could tell him that all her diagnosis on them, the food, their armors, the air they breathed were all normal, but this ‘stumble’ was something that each of them had to cope with on their own.

 

Jake could feel the frown growing with each line of the preliminary findings that he read from the datapad he was holding as the analysis that his half-sister, Professor Ellen Anders, was currently working on in her unofficial laboratory. Compared to the bio-stasis room where Dr. Halsey worked, this place was a clean sheet, and not one component or object that had been retrieved from the former ONI listening post before and after the ambush was scattered.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked, tapping the datapad, just in case it had messed up on the translation.

“Let me see,” she said, plucking the datapad from his hands without warning and scrutinized the screen. She set the pad down on the table and her hands flew over the keyboard. “It’s correct,” she stated. “Why?”

“Traces of Flood-based DNA swimming around its cells?” he asked, slightly dubious, yet the pit of dread was starting to grow in his stomach.

“It is one explanation as to how that creature was kept alive and didn’t die of poisoning by consuming rotted meat,” Ellen replied, folding her arms across her chest. “The base form of the infectious creature suggests a remarkable adaptability to any type of sentient being that is capable of thought processes. The shipyard Shield World had plenty of host creatures that included birds and the like, only that when it infected both Human and Covenant, then it started to get smarter.”

“According to this, the Flood-form would have never survived vacuum. The only way it could have gotten into the Brute was if the Flood-form had hitched a ride inside an EVA suit or the Spartans’ armor,” he said.

“Jerrod,” Ellen said into the open air, knowing that the AI and the other AI, Serina, were monitoring all conversations. “Please summon Dr. Reinhart and--” she visibly shook her head, “—and that woman, Dr. Halsey, here. Tell them it’s urgent.”

“Will do, ma’am,” the AI replied.

“Might I suggest a glass of water, Professor Anders?” Serina’s voice piped through the speakers to this chamber. “Your stress levels have spiked. The water may help you calm down.”

“Serina,” Ellen said, irritated by the interruption of the AI, “shut up and stop butting in.”

“Ellen, what did Dr. Halsey do to tick you off so much?” Jake asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

“None of your business, Jake. You may be my half-brother, but that still does not give you the right to try to pry into my personal life,” she coldly said, turning back to the laptop.

“I did not mean to intrude,” he apologized just as the door to the makeshift lab opened and Drs. Halsey and Reinhart entered. Jake felt the theoretical temperature drop like a stone.

“You rang?” Dr. Reinhart asked, as they approached and Ellen turned with the laptop in her hands to place it on the central table. Jake also placed the datapad next to the laptop as the four of them crowded around so they had a good view of the laptop. He noted that both Dr. Halsey and Ellen were distinctly standing apart from each other, with Dr. Reinhart and him between the two women.

“Doctors,” Ellen began, keeping her voice as civil as possible, though Jake heard the underlying irritation and anger. “We may have had a possible Flood-infiltrator aboard the ship.” Tapping on a few things on the laptop, she gestured to the screen and continued. “Preliminary bio-analysis of the dead Brute suggests that the Brute had been dead for a brief time before we entered the asteroid. The resurgence of its bodily form by the means of the regeneration from the Flood-based DNA, gave it enough strength for it to rise from the dead and attack.”

“Are these numbers correct?” Dr. Halsey asked, scrutinizing the screen and the datapad.

“Yes,” Ellen replied, a trace of annoyance slipping through.

“So then, if the Flood-based form has infiltrated the Brute, then it could not have come from the base, could it not, Professor?” Dr. Reinhart asked.

“The probability of that happening is less than a half-percent,” Ellen replied. “It is most likely that the alien life-form hitched a ride through an EVA suit or armor. However, its origins are unknown. It could have come from being buried within an EVA suit in the cryo chambers aboard the _Spirit of Fire_ , or it could have originated from this ship. The likelihood that it came from the _Spirit of Fire_ is as probable as it is from the ship, though less for the _Spirit of Fire_ , because we entered a cleansing ring-like structure that eliminated all traces of Flood-borne pathogens on the exterior of the ship…similar to the Halo construct.”

“But the cleansing ring would not have eliminated any Flood-forms or Flood-based pathogens _inside_ of your vessel,” Dr. Halsey pointed out.

“No,” she admitted, “it wouldn’t have, but before I went into cryo, I had Serina do a ship-wide scan for any Flood-forms.” Turning her head slightly upwards, she asked, “Serina, pull up archive logs of scans since our escape from the Shield World.”

“As you wish, ma’am,” Serina replied in a mock subservient voice while one of the consoles on the other side of the table displayed a holographic view of multiple charts.

The four of the moved over to the other side of the table and Ellen continued, saying, “Flood-based forms had been found lurking in the decks below the cryo chambers for quite some time, but due to the extensive damage taken by the ship, I have extrapolated that the forms were killed when exposed to vacuum.”

“But that doesn’t eliminate the entire possibility that the Flood-form had not been brought on this ship and transported via EVA suit,” Dr. Reinhart said.

“Correct,” she replied, “but the probability of that is lower than the fact that there may be Flood-forms aboard this ship.”

“Captain Cutter did mention the possibility of Flood-forms on the ship as to the reason why the Onyx Sentinels are chasing after us,” Jake spoke up. “Mainly to eliminate us as a potential food supply to the Flood.”

“So then if the Brute was infected by the Flood-form, then who or how did it hitch a ride to the asteroid? Could it have been possibly on the asteroid before we even got there?” Dr. Reinhart asked.

“No,” Ellen said, shaking her head, “Only the Brute had trace amounts of Flood-based DNA in its freeze-dried body. The others were killed by their own weapons.”

“Which also puzzles me as to why…?” Dr. Reinhart murmured before falling silent.

“One mystery at a time, Anton,” Jake said, turning the datapad back towards him. He scrolled through the analysis while Ellen continued with her assessment.

“Due to the proximity of where the Brute attacked, I will need to look at the DNA markers for both Lieutenant Hattersfield and Spartan-bee-zero-nine-one.”

“Their markers are clean,” Dr. Halsey said, folding her arms over her chest. “There are no traces of genetic alterations bearing any Flood-based DNA.”

“With all due respect,” Ellen started—

“Which means you’re saying, ‘go shove that into a Slipspace hole’,” Dr. Halsey cut her off.

“Ladies,” Dr. Reinhart started, leaning in a bit and placing his hands out to placate and silence both women. “Please.”

Stony silence filled the chamber as Ellen and Dr. Halsey glared at each other and Jake could feel the temperature drop even further. Ice crystals could instantly form out of a breath if it were actually true. He broke the silence by saying, “Perhaps everyone should be tested. I’ll bring the prelim report to Captain Cutter and debrief him on it. I think everyone that is mobile should be present when we get the full report together.”

“I concur,” Dr. Reinhart nodded his agreement. “In the mean time, I suggest that you, Catherine, please give Professor Anders the samples that you have run. Professor, please come up with a full report so we can present it to the captain and the crew.” He looked at the two women as if they were mere children instead of adults, and though he had no jurisdiction over either one of them, like Jake, he was hoping that they could at least cooperate enough to get something done.

After a very reluctant but curt nod from both women, Jake pocketed the datapad and left, while Dr. Reinhart stayed behind to work out the details. Some things would never change, but for the sake of the crew and the chilling possibility of what they could be harboring, he hoped that his half-sister’s assessment was just a chase down the proverbial rabbit hole.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1800 hours, November 30, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

Silence enveloped the holographic chamber with the entire crew gathered around the projector whose system map had been replaced by several files from the research that Professor Anders had done so far. Everyone had their focus on the professor as she presented what she had found, and Franklin Mendez could see their faces turn paler with every passing minute.

Well, two faces could not get any paler, for Lucy had only woke up an hour ago and was currently being supported and held up by Tom and Kelly for the briefing. Dr. Halsey had told her to stay in the bio-stasis room and listen through COM, but the young Spartan had just glared at the doctor until Tom had convinced Dr. Halsey to let her go. Leigh was leaning slightly on the console, as pale and gaunt-looking as Lucy looked, but she was standing on her own, having woken up in the morning.

He normally did not panic at the sight of a wounded comrade or teammate, but when he had seen the state that his daughter had been in, he had felt a brief flash of panic overtake him. The control he had over himself had been briefly lost, but he had regained it quickly. Now however, he was extremely relieved that both Leigh and Lucy were going to survive. Something inside of him after the countless of years of watching many of those he trained be sent into the endless war had hardened him, but after Kurt’s death, something inside of him had snapped.

This war had too many damned heroes who died.

Now however, what Professor Anders was saying had put a damper and a chill on his nerves, though he kept it tightly buttoned up. Sometimes he wondered what the Spartans thought of him in all the years that he trained them. He was their worst nightmare, yet he was also their mentor through the thick and thin of training. He cared about them, but he could never show it to them, and could only hope that his training gave them enough to survive to fight for one more day. If he did not keep what he felt buttoned up and let the words of the professor visibly affect him, he knew that morale would drop to an unrecoverable low.

He could see the subtlety of guilt and the lingering shock already hovering in the minute body language, though masked almost quite as well in MJOLNIR armor, by the way Lieutenant Fred-104 held himself in the recent days. The rest he had given brief pep talks to, though he had heard from Dr. Halsey that the brief psychological profile that she had done while patching them up was still within normal operating levels.

The last advice he had given to the SPARTAN-IIs, not counting the conversations he had had with Kurt during the training years of the SPARTAN-IIIs, was to Master Chief John-117. With Kurt, advice he had given and taken from the Spartan had been easily exchanged, for Kurt was more open than any of the other Spartans he had trained and seen grown up. With the Lieutenant, that was another story and didn’t know how the Lieutenant would react to advice. Kelly seemed the closest to the Lieutenant, being his second-in-command, but there was the gulf of NCO to officer that separated their friendship.

He blinked and focused his thoughts back on to the professor’s presentation. There would be time later to think of such things. After all that he heard about the Flood from Dr. Halsey and from listening to the conversations that the other Spartans had with each other, he was worried. Not scared, but worried that something unimaginable, something terribly similar to what the Master Chief had encountered in the Halo construct lurked in their ship. If indeed there were Flood-forms on this ship, then bringing it to Earth or to any of the colonies would be dangerous. But one question lingered in his mind—

“Professor, if the Flood-form had possessed the Brute, why did it not possess whomever it had hitched a ride to the asteroid? Why the Covenant and not Human?” Captain Cutter interrupted, stroking his chin in puzzlement.

“Intelligence?” Professor Anders replied, shrugging a bit. “It may be a new form that none of us have encountered before. Whatever it is, it still may have left traces in the bloodstream…which brings me to my next proposal.” She paused for a second before bringing up a few more charts that showed two DNA helixes, and a DNA strand that did not look remotely human. “Doctors Reinhart and Halsey have helped me with the analysis, and as you can see, the two on the left are Human DNA strands, completely free of any Flood-enzymes. The one on the right is the Brute’s DNA, and from what little I know about their physiology, there were a few markers that looked strange. However, based on the data that I had been given, I believe that the three of us can successfully isolate the Flood-enzyme and see who may have carried it.”

There was something in her eyes, the way she gestured to the DNA strands that Franklin did not like. It hit him that even though Dr. Halsey and Dr. Reinhart were present with her during her analysis, she had finally unraveled some elements of the SPARTAN Programs. She didn’t look happy either about that fact. For a civilian that was affiliated with ONI she certainly did not have the clearance to know such things, and he was worried. Not for those in the Programs, but for her. If they got back to UNSC-controlled space, she was sure to disappear, never to be seen again.

Her assessment and knowledge about xenobiology and the Covenant were incredible, and in the short amount of time she had taken in examining the frozen Brute, she had even decoded a little of its DNA. If ONI stuck her in some hole to never see the light of day, then they were going to throw away a very valuable asset, no matter how brilliant she was. He knew from observation that Dr. Halsey was absolutely not fond of Professor Anders, and he cared not to find out why. He also knew that it was not beneath the doctor to use those with knowledge as she pleased, and not protect them from reprisals, due to the sensitive nature of what she had worked with. Dr. Reinhart was made of the same mentality, except he was quite genial about it, though he remembered the doctor being a bit less ruthless in experimentations than Dr. Halsey. But the doctor was Section Zero, and certainly non-existent according to ONI, so they would not listen to him concerning a mere civilian that had nothing to do with ORION or SPARTAN.

“So you want all of us to be tested, I presume?” Captain Cutter asked.

“Yes, though Lieutenant Hattersfield and Spartan-bee-zero-nine-one are cleared,” the professor replied.

“How long will it take?”

“If I devote all our resources, then around forty-eight hours, captain,” she replied.

“Then that is the time you have, professor, before we being the op,” Captain Cutter said with an air of finality.

“Pardon me,” Dr. Halsey interrupted before they could all make to leave. “But wouldn’t it be prudent _not_ to destroy the Sentinels if there are indeed, Flood-forms on this ship?”

“They’re not chasing the source of the infection, doctor,” Captain Cutter stated, “they’re chasing down the food source and starving the infection. Starving the Flood will only let a hapless traveler discover this ship and get locked into the same fate as we did. We’re going to stop both.”

Franklin saw the hesitation in Dr. Halsey and saw her frown and then open her mouth to protest, but thought better of it. Instead, she closed her mouth and thinned her lips in displeasure. The other scientists’ expressions were more of a fearful look or completely unreadable. He could tell that every one of them was hoping that the Flood-form that had escaped onto the ship was a leftover from the _Spirit of Fire_ and not from the Forerunner ship. Only time would tell.

“Leigh, Fred, Jake, please stay, the rest of you, dismissed and report to the doctors,” Captain Cutter said.

Franklin gave a crisp salute, as did the other Spartans and Marines, and left, though he did glance slightly back to see Leigh push herself slightly off the console she had been leaning on to stand straight. She was a fighter that she was, just like her mother.

 

When the chamber was finally cleared except for the four of them, Jake looked up at the star map that had replaced the charts that Ellen had displayed. They had not been able to wire the galaxy map into this chamber, even though the star map had been successfully wired into the bridge. The galaxy was a vast amount of space that harbored such a deadly life form that had caused the Forerunners to create the Halo constructs…

“Creighton and Fred, I need both of you and a few others to go EVA in thirty-six hours and mine the field with the HORNETs. Take the Booster Frames for long-range. Hattersfield, that HAVOK warhead’s access codes need decrypting, can you do that?”

“Sir, Jake is better at decryption than I am,” Leigh spoke up, her voice a bit hoarse but not as wheezy as it had been earlier in the day.

Captain Cutter studied her for a moment before saying, “You’re still injured, Hattersfield. God only knows how you’re able to walk and talk after only two days of recovery. You’re not fit for EVA.”

Jake saw her keep a tight leash on her emotion, allowing nothing to show on her face, but he could see the irritation in her eyes. “Yes, sir,” she bit out. If only the captain knew what exactly he and Leigh were, then he would have no problem switching their roles in preparation for the upcoming operation. However, the secrecy had to be maintained, for both Section Zero and for the captain’s sake.

“Sir,” Serina spoke up, having remained strangely silent throughout the entire presentation that Professor Anders gave, “I believe that I can help with the decryption.”

“No,” the captain replied, “I need you and Jerrod to concentrate on the translation of the ship. We’re going to need as much control over all the functions as possible when we finally destroy the Sentinels. If there are Flood-forms on this ship, then I want them isolated and unable to get into anything, including the vents.” Captain Cutter returned his attention to the three of them, saying, “The rest of the plan will follow the fifth iteration you’ve given me. Prioritize a team for EVA and I’ll let the doctors know to clear the two of you and your team first. Dismissed.”

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 0545 hours, December 2, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

_I am not an invalid_ , Leigh bitterly thought as she sat cross-legged on the floor, in front of the inert and inactive HAVOK warhead. A datapad was hooked up to it and she was scrolling through several code combinations that she and Jake had worked on in the past few hours. Currently though, Jake was down at the airlock, getting ready for the EVA. He, Fred, Kelly, a couple of the _Spirit of Fire_ Marines that had experience with planting mines, and Douglas had been cleared by the doctors.

The alpha-numeric coding that had been originally input into the HAVOK warhead had been deactivated, whether by chance or by some other means, which meant the access code was now scrambled. Both she and Jake had access codes to HAVOK warheads, but none of them had worked on this one, hence the creation of a decryption method. They could not input any algorithms into the small CPU or else the warhead would instantly explode since it was already primed. There were only five letters or numbers in the twenty-digit code left that needed to be decrypted, with each one uniquely encrypted.

She mentally sighed. Jake had a knack for cryptology, though he wasn’t as good as their deceased teammate, Xing-Hua, who had an uncanny intuition in the field. She felt stronger in the past thirty-six hours, but it seemed that nothing would change Captain Cutter’s mind. She’d rather be out there in weightlessness than constantly stuck in gravity. The only chance she got to see the ship in person instead of holographically was when she had traveled to the asteroid, and her mind had actually rebelled at the sheer size of it.

Enormous was not even the right word to have described the size of the ship.

As absorbed as she was in her decryption, she did not miss the muffled footsteps that was approaching from another corridor and immediately drew her pistol and pointed it with a steady hand at the incoming noise. However, she lowered the pistol when she saw who it was.

She internally frowned; there was no way that anyone could have deliberately stumbled upon this particular corridor unless they were either looking for the warhead or her. This was the least traveled corridor in the levels they had control over in the ship. She holstered her gun and stood up.

Wordlessly she stuck out a gauntleted hand, and though there was a very slight hesitation, Fred reciprocated the gestured and shook her hand. Equal parts and pieces, all forgiven and all remembered. She harbored no ill towards him or those who had scoured the base for it was equal fault on all of them for not having anticipated the presence of the Flood. The loss of Taryn and Garrett, two of her Marines, was heavy on her mind, but they had a mission to complete. She would mourn them later, when they were not being hunted.

She let go and said, “Fly safely.”

“Will do, ma’am,” Fred replied, and gave her a crisp salute before turning and leaving.

She saw the minute difference between his approach and his departure. The guilt that he should not have been harboring for something not his fault was gone. His confidence was back, and Leigh knew that he was going to be all right. Sitting back down, she smiled to herself as she tapped away at the datapad; commanders were as infallible as any other soldier, but good commanders, like Fred, learned from their mistakes. In one of the guest lectures when she and Jake had attended OCS, Admiral Whitcomb had told the candidates an old axiom of command: To be a good leader you had to love the service. To be a great commander, you had to be willing to destroy that which you loved.

All leaders needed to learn to destroy that they cherished the most by putting the lives of their men and women at risk, mistakes and all. She had learned that lesson when seven of the ten children of the ORION candidates survived the final augmentation processes. Fred was a solid soldier in terms of the first part of old axiom from his days as a NCO leader, but he had to make that one final transition between enlisted and officer to become a true commander. He needed to be willing to send out his Spartans, knowing that any mission he sent them on could be their last.

 

In the darkness of space, punctured by an enormous Forerunner vessel and millions of kilometers of a proto-planetary star system, twelve HORNET mines were being carefully laid out in a trap. None of them saw the tiny, cloaked Covenant Banshee detach from the ONI base asteroid and fly away in all haste.

 

~*~*~*~


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1900 hours, December 2, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

The inky darkness of space, illuminated only by the harsh sun reflected off the metallic, icy-enveloped, and carbonaceous asteroids that littered the place was partially obscured by the massive lead doors that were half-way opened. Fred and his team, consisting of Linda, Jerome, Alice, and Douglas, re-designated for this particular op as Blue two, -three-, -four, and –five, calmly sat on the inert Booster Frames, except for him. He was standing by the edge of one of the massive doors, tuned into BROADCOM, waiting for the signal.

The massive Forerunner ship was already at least fifty kilometers away after it had pushed the former ONI listening post asteroid out of the radiation field so that the Frames could properly work. Now, it was rising out of its rubble grave and soon, the Sentinels lurking in its bowels would send the signal for the rest to attack. As soon as it did that, and the rest jumped in, the HORNET mines would be set off, hopefully destroying many of the machines. Blue Team’s job would be to sweep the rest up. The others inside the ship would be taken care of by Jake, Kelly, and the rest of the Spartans and Marines.

There were too many complications and too many unknowns banking on the operation, and he didn’t like it, but it was the best plan they could come up with, given all the scenarios they had gone though. He just considered them extremely lucky to have found twelve HORNET mines _and_ working Booster Frames. However, none of them had carried the Flood form with them, and all of them had been cleared by the doctors. That was another complication. Not a snag yet, but he knew that it could be a potential snag in the future.

“Contact,” he heard Lieutenant Hattersfield whisper over a direct beam COM channel. “Good hunting Blue Team.”

Not a moment later did several tiny bright suns flash across the darkness of space, enveloping the Forerunner ship in its harsh glare, cutting all communications off. Fred’s faceplate tinted a bit to compensate for the sudden addition of illumination before returning to normal. All HAVOK warheads, each with a yield of thirty-megatons and specifically designed for vacuum usage, had been detonated. Seconds later, the EMP washed over the asteroid, and though Fred’s MJOLNIR armor was able to withstand the pulse, the sensation of millions of prickles across his skin was still felt. The others were protected behind the partially opened lead doors, but he felt the distinct rumbling across the metal floor from the Covenant generators die as some of the pulse traveled into the base.

Luck was definitely on their side as the prickly sensation died away and he activated his magnetic soles and jogged back to his Booster Frame. He leapt in, and settled himself down as the cool sensation filled the back of his mind as his armor connected with the interface port at the back of his helmet. All five Frames switched on and he could feel the power of a good start to the engines beneath and behind him.

He gave one green light, the ‘go’ signal, and they gunned their Frames and flew out, activating the full configuration of the spacecraft. Each combination of lights that he gave to his team was designated for a particular weapon they had on the Frames. However, unlike the last time he had piloted a Frame, their ammunition was limited, but still enough to wreck quite a bit of havoc. There were no gauss cannon on the Frames however, but they didn’t need it, for they were not punching through a Covenant fleet.

Swarms of Sentinels that had not been obliterated by the warheads were barely visible in their inert state, having been shut down by the EMP waves, but there were still plenty of active Sentinels that littered the darkness of space. Said Sentinels turned their glowing sensors towards the incoming threat. But before they could gather and form into a lattice, Fred winked a series of lights and launched the missiles that were in the MITV pods towards the active Sentinels, while he fired the 80mm ball-mounted rotary cannons at the inert Sentinels.

Thousands of fireballs bloomed in space as the spread-out team blew past the debris and launched more missiles to overwhelm the Sentinels that were quickly adapting to their speed and were clustering into large lattices. Many more were clustered into smaller lattices while diving and firing their beam weaponry, and as the Spartans dodged and weaved around in space, locking and firing their weapons onto the machines, more kept coming after them.

“COM free,” he tersely spoke over TEAMCOM with their element of surprise gone. It didn’t matter if the Sentinels could triangulate where they were for they were not on Onyx anymore. They were in open space, ready to fight.

“Seven clusters on your six dive now, Douglas!” Jerome shouted over the localized TEAMCOM, as fireballs erupted close to Fred and a Frame reversed thrusters and inverted itself to go after stragglers.

Proximity sensors blared at Fred as he weaved and dodged, gunning his cannon at the Sentinels pursuing him, while he launched another round of missiles towards several small lattices. The Sentinels scattered, and even as their beams shot down the incoming salvo, the barrage of additional missiles overwhelmed the machines, and thousands more exploded, only to be quickly quenched by the vacuum of space.

A solid tone droned at him as he felt the impact of several Sentinel beams directly hit his Frame, completely draining the spacecraft’s shields. He quickly shunted power from the engines to the shield and evened it out, just as another blast came. He barely dodged it, but the shield was drained again, and this time, one of the beams nicked, him, draining his MJOLNIR shield to half. He threw the Frame into a tight barrel roll, rolling up and away from the turn that placed the pursuing Sentinels right in his rotary cannons sights. He pulled the trigger and the pursing Sentinels exploded in a brief shower of fire and flecks of metal.

As he flew through the debris, he broke port and shifted the slowly recharging shield’s powers back to his engines. Several lattices of Sentinels graced his HUD and he placed markers on them. Winks of acknowledgement rapidly fired through his HUD as all five of them let loose several salvos of missiles. Fireballs grazed his shields again as more clusters’ shields flared with the incoming barrage from all sides.

Proximity alarms blared again, and he threw the Frame into a scissoring maneuver just as Sentinel beams crisscrossed the path in which he had been on, draining his Frame’s shield to a quarter.

“Eyeballs plucked, Lead,” Alice’s crisp voice came over TEAMCOM.

He pulled out of the maneuver and unleashed a slew of missiles at the five clusters that had dropped into Alice’s blind spot, firing short bursts of beams at her Frame, to which the shield was sputtering from the rapid overload. The clusters bloomed into several balls of fire for one brief instant. “Yours too, Four,” he said before breaking and climbing a full vertical path away from the lateral spread of the Sentinels.

At the apex of his climb, he looped and pushed all power into the engines, giving him an enormous boost of speed as he dived straight down into the lattice that was now combined with what Sentinels were left. Throwing the Frame into a corkscrew, Fred saw the glow of the Sentinels turn red, and winked another series of lights. There was no doubt in his mind that the spherical lattice of Sentinels was about to combine their entire hive mind and fire their beams in all directions.

He flicked the last of the switches off and fired all the remaining missiles he had, while holding the triggers to the cannons down with no stop. From the underside of the spherical lattice, Blue Five did the same, and from the three sides, the rest of Blue Team unleashed hell upon the Sentinels.

The resulting explosion was like a second sun being born as Fred’s faceplate tinted to full while pulling up from his dive. However, he still blew through the edge of the massive fireball and blue-white flames licked the Frame’s shields, completely draining them as sparks and arcs of electricity raced across his control panel. He could feel blisters on his skin form as his armor’s shields failed and the internal cooling system became taxed beyond its maximum limit.

“Lead! Five!” Alice’s voice came over TEAMCOM.

“Cooked, but not fried,” he calmly replied, as damage assessment diagnostics for both his armor and the Frame scrolled through his HUD. The damage was not severe enough to render his spacecraft inoperable, and his armor was in the midst of resetting a few systems. “Team status!”

“No enemy contacts, Lead,” Jerome answered. “They’ve been obliterated. I’m green across the board.”

“My ride is a wreck,” Douglas said, though there was a touch of a mournful tone in his voice.

“Green,” Alice said while Linda just merely winked a green status light, still in her icy-cold no-thought Zen state.

Fred breathed a mental sigh of relief as circled around his teammates and he saw the sparks and arcs of electricity crawling all over Douglas’s Booster Frame. Several holes puncture it, and it looked like it was also leaking something gaseous into space. One of its engines was sputtering and another looked quite dead. It was definitely a wreck. However, it didn’t look like it would explode anytime soon, but he was taking no chances.

“Five, abandon it and hop onto Four’s Frame,” he ordered. “Blue Team, we’re going to take a tour of the field. Let’s make sure none of them are hiding--”

He stopped mid-sentence just as a chillingly familiar luminous-manta-ray-shaped ship emerged from Slipspace. Its iridescent hull gleamed with a purplish color, and it emerged only a hundred kilometers away from the Forerunner vessel. Just when he thought the nightmare was starting to become less of a nightmare, the arrival of a Covenant battle cruiser put an all stop to his thoughts.

“And I thought my glass was beyond half-empty,” Douglas muttered over TEAMCOM.

“Can it, Five,” Fred ordered. “Weapons check.”

“Not much cannon ammo left, sir, but enough to possibly to infiltrate the battle cruiser,” Alice said and the rest winked their agreement.

“Standby,” Fred said and opened an encrypted TEAMCOM channel to Captain Cutter and Lieutenant Hattersfield, saying, “Blue Team still has some ammo left to infiltrate the battle cruiser. Advise.”

“Sta--” Lieutenant Hattersfield began, but was roughly drowned out by an ear-piercing squeal over the COM.

Serina’s voice came over BROADCOM, but instead of the bitingly sarcastic tone Fred was used to hearing, the AI’s voice was strangely monotone, as the AI said, “This is UNSC AI Serina in control of this vessel you treasure. You are the heretics of your Gods and worthless to possess this holy relic. Humanity is our children and we shall suffer no other. Come and get this vessel, if you dare.”

 

“Incoming Slipspace portal, fifty kilometers off port bow,” Jerrod’s voice interrupted the momentary silence in the COM traffic from those below decks. Only moments ago, Jake had radioed their success in destroying the Sentinels that lurked below. Though neither Leigh nor Captain Cutter could hear the localized TEAMCOM from Blue Team out in space, they saw the intense dogfight between the Spartans and the Sentinels. They had yet to hear word from Fred.

“It can’t be,” Captain Cutter breathed as the two of them stared at what the holographic projection was showing them.

“Confirm Covenant battle cruiser,” Jerrod crisply said. “Sir, it’s hailing us on the Forerunner network.”

“How the hell did it get _that_?”

“Unknown sir,” the AI replied.

But before either of them could say anything, their COMs crackled and whined a bit as an encrypted frequency was pushed through. Fred’s voice came though, saying, “Blue Team still has some ammo left to infiltrate the battle cruiser. Advise.”

Leigh merely looked to Captain Cutter who was frowning at the holographic view of the Covenant battle cruiser. There was a chance that the ship no matter how it had discovered them, thought that they were actual Forerunners. If they could play off on the ignorance, then maybe they would not have to engage in combat and could possibly dupe the Covenant into letting them go. Into the encrypted frequency, she said, “Sta--”

A squeal tore through the COM network, but was abruptly cut off as an unusually disturbing monotone voice belonging to Serina broadcasted through all frequencies, saying, “This is UNSC AI Serina in control of this vessel you treasure. You are the heretics of your Gods and worthless to possess this holy relic. Humanity is our children and we shall suffer no other. Come and get this vessel, if you dare.”

“Jerrod, shut her down!” Captain Cutter shouted.

“Unable to comply, sir,” the AI’s voice came through, sounding incredibly strained. “I’m trying to maintain control over all systems that she doesn’t have control over.”

The growls of a Covenant soldier answered the call, and a moment later, Leigh saw the Covenant battle cruiser accelerate towards them, guns blazing. “Covenant ship is moving towards us!”

“Move us away, Hattersfield!”

She scrambled to the control station, but when she stuck her hands into the strange piloting controls, and twisted them, there was no visible movement that she could see from the holographic projection. “Controls are non-responsive!” She hurried to the structural layout and systems information console. “Jump drives offline, propulsive systems offline, shields active--”. Impacts from the Covenant weaponry shuddered throughout the ship, cutting her momentarily off. “Shields at fifty, recharge is slowly responding. Weapons system is still active, though we’re only going to get one or two shots.”

“Jerrod, hold on to life support and access-teleportation. Do not, I repeat, do not let Serina gain control!” the captain said. Over BROADCOM and through the encrypted frequency to Blue Team, he said, “All hands, brace for Covenant boarding! Blue Team, get onto that ship!”

There was a chorus of acknowledgements, and without looking up at her, Captain Cutter said, “Hattersfield, get down there and help them. I’ll hold the fort here.”

Leigh hesitated for a second before giving him a crisp salute, “Yes, sir.”

 

“Blue Team, get onto that ship!” Captain Cutter’s voice came through the encrypted channel.

“Concentrate all firepower on this point,” Fred said, as he and his team gunned their Frames at full speed towards the Covenant battle cruiser, placing a nav marker on the enormous hangar bay it had.

Winks of acknowledgement graced his HUD. Even at the distance they were closing in on, he could already see the flits and rapid bursts of energy weapons being discharged from the battle cruiser towards the Forerunner ship. The Forerunner ship’s shields flared golden as it absorbed the impacts, but the shield would not hold for long under that barrage.

The Covenant vessel, so focused on the Forerunner ship, had not noticed the Spartans yet, and as soon as they were within range for the cannons to actually start doing damage, he said over TEAMCOM, “Weapons free.”

Hails of bullets from the cannons were spat out towards the marker point, and lances of angry purple beam weapons answered. He juked and jinxed around the beams, half-hoping that his Frame would hold together long enough for them to punch a hole through the shields. As they approached, he could see the shimmer of the vessel’s shields start to fade and collapse as Seraphs shot out of the bay.

“Incoming!” he shouted over TEAMCOM, and they scattered.

“That’s it, my Frame is toast!” Douglas cried.

“Jump to Four!” Fred ordered. “I got you covered.”

Douglas leapt from the spluttering Frame and landed neatly on the back of Alice’s Frame. “Gun,” he grunted over TEAMCOM.

Fred unleashed several rounds of the cannons at the incoming Seraphs just as Alice’s M41 ELAAGat popped up for Douglas to use. The heavy-weapons specialist Spartan swung the massive gun around and muttered over TEAMCOM, “Duck and cover, Four.”

The heap of junk that had been a Booster Frame continued to sail on its trajectory for the middle of the bay, and without another word, both Linda and Jerome swooped behind it, pouring what was left of their rounds of the cannons into the shield point while throwing their frames into corkscrews to prevent the Covenant ship’s weapons from getting a lock. Fred, Alice, and Douglas chewed away at the incoming splatters of beams, while weaving in and out of crossfire of the Seraphs.

A clear warning tone blasted over Fred’s ears as he glanced down at the displays of his Frame. It indicated that a large energy surge was about to be unleashed from behind them. “Blue Team, break now!” he shouted over TEAMCOM.

A split second later, the electric blue beam of the Forerunner vessel weapons system lanced across where they had been occupying the space, leaving a trail of fireballs in its wake as it slammed into the shield of the Covenant battle cruiser. Its shield flare to an intensely bright white illumination as all of the battle cruiser’s shielding power was dumped to that particular area to try to combat the Forerunner beam weapon. However, it was all for naught as the shield collapsed under the pressure, leaving the bay and its surrounding structure on fire and completely exposed.

“ _Spartans: go-go-go_!” he shouted, as his team poured all power to their Frames’ engines and accelerated straight for the mangled bay.

 

“Hull breaches on level seventeen, thirty-four, and seventy-seven!” Jerrod’s voice sounded over the speakers, as Leigh pounded through the corridors, racing to the teleportation device. Her Marines that hadn’t been with Jake on his part of the Sentinel op, along with the rest of the surviving Marines from the _Spirit of Fire_ were streaming behind her, all weapons locked and loaded.

With the Marines clustered around the teleportation pad, she shouted her destination and they were transported to the seventeenth level. She could already hear the chattering of Grunts beyond the corridor maze and gestured for her team to spread out, some taking the left, while she, Foxtrot, and November took the right. She cautiously approached the intersection and quickly peeked out, seeing a few Grunts clustered in small groups, looking around the corridor in awe.

She made a chucking motion with her hand along with two held up fingers, and one of her Marines nodded. Two grenades popped out from the corridor they were hidden in and were lobbed down the Grunt-infested corridor. The startled squeaks of the Grunts quickly became dying cries as the grenades exploded.

They popped out from hiding and mowed the rest down with their rifles. More Grunts, and a few Jackals, alerted by the noise, poured out of the hole that connected the Forerunner ship to the Covenant vessel. Needles, green-red-blue plasma rounds, and bullets crisscrossed the air, as both sides opened fire. She ducked into a tiny alcove to avoid the intense fire as November backed up into the other corridor and Foxtrot ducked into another alcove. Rifle, shotgun, and pistol rounds opened fire on the opposite side of the long corridor as the other half of Leigh’s team sprang up and peppered the Covenant on their backsides.

Plasma grenades flew through the air as Leigh dove out of her alcove just as one embedded itself where she had been. It exploded, forcing her back, as she primed a grenade and lobbed it at the horde. They scattered to the sides, allowing November to pop back into the fight and lob a few more grenades. The explosion shook the corridor as she and Foxtrot ran towards the breach, while the others razed what was left with their weapons.

Both she and Team Foxtrot chucked several grenades into the hole. Muffled explosions and howls of the dying Covenant forces echoed down the corridor before falling silent. She picked up two plasma grenades that had fallen from the downed Grunts and Jackals and reloaded her rifle.

“Hold position here,” she ordered. “Foxtrot, you’re with me. We’re going to thirty-four.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Marines answered.

“Jake,” she called over TEAMCOM, “Status?” She received winking amber and red lights across her HUD as she hurried back to the teleporter, which meant that Jake and his team, were engaged in enemy combat.

As soon as she and Foxtrot were situated on the teleporter, she called for level thirty-four and they were immediately thrown into a firefight. Bullets, plasma rounds, needles, and other types of ammunition she had never seen before were showering the place. She and Foxtrot immediately ducked into alcoves, as she heard the bellowing roar of Brutes, along with the squeaks of Grunts.

She made a motion with her hands for grenades, and together, she and Team Foxtrot emerged from their alcoves and lobbed three grenades down the right end of the t-corridor, where the hail of Covenant weaponry were coming from. “Grenades!” she yelled. Three explosions tore through the place, the sound oddly muffled by the strange metal that covered the ship. A hail of gunfire from those on the left side of the t-corridor answered the explosions, and there were several yelps and screams of the Covenant forces dying.

She winked a double-green light to signal those on the other side to let them know that there were friendlies incoming, and motioned Foxtrot to follow her. Hunkered behind a large corpse of a dead Brute were Tom and Lucy, and they winked their acknowledgement lights as she and Foxtrot vaulted over the corpse and checked the other side of the corridor. The rest of her Marines were on the other side, mowing down the last of the Grunts that had tried to ambush them from the other side.

“Hull breach on levels twenty-seven, forty-three, fifty--” Jerrod’s voice over the speakers was abruptly cut off in a wash of static, just as another horde of Covenant soldiers consisting of Jackals with their shields, Drones, and Grunts streamed through the breach and attacked.

Shards of needles sailed over Leigh’s head as she dropped to the floor and belly-crawled to where the two SPARTAN-IIIs were. Foxtrot was headed to where the rest of the Marines were. When there was a brief pause, she and the two others popped up and let loose a few bullets. “Suicide Grunt!” she yelled as soon as she spotted an oddly blue-glowing Grunt turn the corner, with several primed plasma grenades in its hands, along with a belt-full of others.

The grunt charged through the ranks of its fallen comrades, and others who had been peppered by bullets but were continuing to fire their needlers and plasma pistols at them. Risking injury, she popped up and unleashed a half-clip at the suicide Grunt and it fell, spilling its belt of grenades on the floor. The remaining Grunts immediately fell back, and she shouted, “Fall back!”

The resulting explosion tore a large hole in the corridor, throwing her, Tom, Lucy into the walls, sending pieces of shrapnel slicing into the areas where their armors did not fully cover them. Other pieces of metal and large spike-like objects embedded themselves into their armor, and the dead Brute they had been crouching behind flew through the air, sliced into ribbons, and landed right on top of Tom’s legs.

Leigh shook her head to clear it, though her ears were still ringing, but as soon as she snapped her head up, her hand groped for her rifle and she snatched it up, firing as she got up. Lucy joined her, and down went the Grunts that had survived the massive grenade explosion. Shards of pink needles from the deck below flew towards them, and she leapt back, while Lucy tried to tug the heavy carcass off of Tom’s legs. Leigh picked up a fallen frag grenade from the floor and lobbed it into the gaping maw that showed the deck below. There was an explosion, and nothing came shooting back at her, at least not for the moment.

“Marines, cover!” she ordered as she hurried to where Lucy was. Her HUD indicated Tom’s biosigns to be in a stunned-shock, as evident with his dazed confusion as he tried to bat Lucy’s hands away from removing the carcass. As Leigh’s hearing returned, she heard and saw out of the corner of her eyes, her Marines taking up position as she and Lucy used their strength to push the heavy carcass off. She needed Tom to be alert, and so she slapped his helmet, hard. His biosigns were back to normal after that jolt, and as soon as there was a bit of room between the floor and the carcass, he scooted out and grabbed the shotgun that was lying on the floor.

“Grenades!” one of the Marines cried, just as she saw a brilliantly blue plasma grenade get stuck on one of the Marines. It tore the Marine to pieces, just as the others backed away and in retaliation; they chucked a few down the hole, with two of them jumping down to fight in the level below. Just as the frag grenades exploded, more Jackals and Drones streamed through the far end of the corridor, forcing them to split up and open fire.

“Jerrod, Captain Cutter! Lock levels three and above down!” she shouted over BROADCOM, just as she picked up a grenade and lobbed it over the hole in the floor to the other side while peppering a Drone with bullets. The grenade exploded, and she took three steps to get to her full speed and jumped over the hole, barely missing a plasma grenade that had been lobbed up from the floor below. Reloading, she landed hard and sprayed the remaining Grunts with what was left of her clips before rolling forward to dodge the Drones’ attacks while dropping the rifle and picking up a needler and plasma grenades. A staccato of bullets from behind her downed the Drones, and moments later, two muffled thumps of Lucy and Tom landed behind her before the plasma grenade behind harmlessly exploded.

Without another word, they ran towards the breach, only to face more incoming Covenant soldiers, this time with five angry Brutes among them. Leigh set her jaw, ignored the pain from the shrapnel that were digging into her body, and fired. How long could she and the rest keep this up, she didn’t know, but the Covenant were not going to take over the ship, not while she still had breath in her body.

 

The roar of the air escaping the hangar deck of the Covenant battle cruiser immediately died down to a whisper as the generators on the ship recovered from the blast and sealed the entire deck, just as five UNSC Booster Frames crashed onto the metallic floor. Fred leapt off his and landed hard as the Frame skidded through a legion of Grunts that had been hanging onto a structural support’s rails. The Frame bowled through them as he unloaded a full clip from his rifle into the remaining Grunts, splattering their phosphorescent blood onto the deck, while some of their methane tanks popped, creating secondary explosions.

Several more muffled squeals and pops of methane tanks cascaded throughout the cavernous bay as the rest of his team dispatched the remaining surviving Grunts. All the other Covenant soldiers that had been in the bay had either been sucked out of the bay, had died from asphyxiation, or had been completely vaporized by the Forerunner’s beam weapon, judging from the many dark stains of footprints where a few Jackals had been. He reloaded as he ran for cover, his tracker showing several approaching contacts.

With Spartans on either side of the massive door leading to the hangar bay, it slid quietly opened and the noisy chatter and squeaks of Grunts and Jackals was heard. Four Spartans popped out from hiding and sprayed gunfire, easily overloading the personal shields that the Jackals carried. As soon as all enemy contacts were down, he gestured with his hand for them to move further in, knowing that their fifth team member, Linda would already be getting to a better place to support them as a sniper. With Jerome hefting the Spartan Laser, they staggered themselves as they ran down and into the labyrinth of the twisting corridors that glowed with an eerie blue-purple illumination.

Fred knew that there was a CIC near the center of the ship, and as they ran, splattering short bursts of rounds into the Covenant soldiers responding to their invasion, he quickly scanned the map of the Covenant battle cruiser that John had been in while he had been in the Halo construct and marked where he recognized the symbols where the CIC was. He hoped that the layout was the same for this ship as it had been for John. They had to get to the CIC. Control the ship, and they had control of the battle.

Jerome’s laser eliminated groups who were perched in higher areas of the corridors as they stormed through, while Alice kept a steady stream of bullets pouring out of her SMGs. Douglas was throwing grenades left and right while his SMG was returning short bursts of fire at stray Covenant soldiers. Every single grenade that exploded was very effective in eliminating many Covenant soldiers trying to pour out of side corridors. The only thing that trickled a bit in worry to Fred was the fact that they had not encountered Elites so far. His motion tracker was filled with too many enemy contacts that he couldn’t tell if there were any ghostly contacts of cloaked Elites.

As the last of his rifle’s clips ran empty, Fred dropped the weapon, tucked and rolled forward to the ground as several plasma rounds splashed onto his shields, draining it to quarter before he rolled up and answered with a hail of needles and blue plasma bolts. Grunts exploded with shards of crystalline needles as he breezed by them, their methane tanks igniting others near them. The buzzing sound of Drones filled the air as the bug-like creatures flew out of ducts and vents, only to have quite a few shot down even before the Spartans could open fire. Multiple cracks of Linda’s sniper rifle filled the air, only to be drowned by the staccato report of weapons firing, along with a massive explosion from Jerome’s laser that cleaned out an entire vent full of Drones.

As soon as the currently section they were charging through was cleared, they continued down a secondary maze of corridors that would lead them to the CIC; twisting and turning, killing every Covenant soldier they encountered. But their charge was suddenly halted as a Brute suddenly materialized from one of the side corridors, charging at them, while swinging a familiar looking enormous axe-hammer weapon downwards.

Alice caught the full force of the weapon, even as they dodged a split second before it hit the ground. They slammed hard into the walls of the ship, and just before Fred saw stars and black spots explode before his eyes, he saw Alice’s bio-signs flat-line as the blade-tip of the weapon sliced straight into her while lifting her body up like a rag doll, tossing it as if it were nothing more than a piece of shrapnel. The air was forced from his lungs as he reflexively inhaled and coughed. Blood splattered on the inside of his helmet. His armor’s ballistic gel layer pumped up the pressure as he painfully crumpled against the wall feeling his left shoulder painfully tear again, with his shields completely overloaded by the impact force.

Adrenaline spiked through him, pushing the pain away as his vision fuzzed for a millisecond. He saw other Brutes lumber through, just as the first Brute wielding the giant hammer-like weapon roared and charged towards Jerome, who was struggling to grab his laser. The Brute suddenly jerked forward a bit as Linda’s sniper rifle put two bullets into its skull, giving Jerome a precious second to snatch up his laser, overload it and fire it into the hammer-wielding Brute dead-straight on. It exploded and the laser burned through the hatch of the corridor, clipping another cloaked Brute before ripping half of the corridor apart. Metallic shards and chunks of burnt meat from the shredded Brutes flew all over the place, their blood splattering the floor, making it extremely slippery.

As Fred scrambled up and searched for his scattered weapons, his fingers found a plasma pistol and he held down the trigger to charge it before releasing it at an incoming de-cloaked Brute, before the ugly creature could launch a grenade from its blade-tipped RPG. It rocked back and he kept pouring the sickly green plasma into the Brute as it shook off its initial shock and challengingly roared. The plasma was slowly overloading its shields, but the lances of plasma bolts from a blood-red plasma rifle from another Brute burned through his armor as scorching pain lanced all over him where the bolts hit.

His other hand found a plasma grenade and he primed it and threw it at the rifle-wielding Brute. It adhered to the Brute’s armor as he backed away quickly from the other Brute, before the grenade-stuck Brute gave an inarticulate roar and tried to charge. He dove out of the way, rolling over and over, just as the RPG-wielding Brute launched several grenades, rattling him to his bones as they exploded close to him, driving more shrapnel into his armor and body. Fortunately, the barrage was short lived as the plasma grenade on the other Brute exploded, taking half of the RPG-wielding Brute’s face with it, causing that Brute to drop the RPG as it dropped to the ground, dead.

He rolled to his feet as a hail of gunfire from Douglas peppered the air above him, causing the outline of another cloaked Brute to be seen, that had been about to smash him to the floor with its fists. Fred snatched the blade-tipped RPG up from the ground, and swung it around, smashing the full force of the curved blade straight into the slightly-visible Brute and unloaded two grenades into its guts. It exploded and he turned and threw the weapon to Douglas, just as the Spartan threw his rifle to him. Douglas hefted the weapon and unleashed the rest of its ammo at the incoming horde of Brutes who had discarded their cloaks as they jumped from the burning wreckage of what used to be an adjacent corridor.

Fred thought he heard a series of sniper-rifle reports from above, as he turned to face the incoming threat of more Brutes pouring out from corridors down the way, accompanied by several Grunts and Jackals. By now, his shields should have rebooted, but didn’t as the hail of plasma shot straight towards him. One splashed onto his armor and burned, fusing metal to his skin, as he dodged and fired back. His retaliatory rifle fire was answered with needles and enormous white spikes flying through the air and embedding themselves into the floor where he had been. Dropping the plasma pistol and empty assault rifle, he snatched up two red plasma rifles and jumped out of the way as several bright blue grenades adhered themselves to the floor.

Just as the grenades exploded, he pressed the trigger of both rifles, unleashing a flurry of red bolts towards the crowd of soldiers, covering Douglas’s reloading of the RPG. A second later, Jerome’s laser pulsed and lanced out at the horde, creating a fireball that enveloped and obscured their normal visions for a few seconds. Fred called up infrared and thermal and continued to fire the blood-red plasma rifles at the Covenant soldiers still left standing. The Spartan Laser thudded to the ground, entirely spent, and Jerome snatched up Alice’s SMGs that had been scattered and fired a short burst into the rolling smoke, downing the last of the soldiers that had emerged from those corridors.

Silence enveloped the corridor as the last of the Covenant forces dropped to the slick floor, dead.

The reprieve gave Fred the opportunity to reboot his armor’s software, though that did not help the shields at all, but he saw the fresh statuses of his teammates. All of their biosigns, save the flat-line from Alice, were pushing the red-line, but a cursory glance around him told him that his teammates were still functional, though injured. They had to push on and not get caught up here.

Several rings of sniper rifle rounds rang out, and several Jackals that had been sneaking away and trying to perch themselves up high dropped like stones to the floor. “Let’s go,” he ordered, pushing the loss of Alice aside, as they snatched up weapons and grenades before moving down another corridor.

This one was eerily quiet as they hurried down, and there was nothing showing up on Fred’s tracker, not even the ghostly motion of cloaked enemies. He took point while Jerome watched their backs and Douglas was between the two of them with his RPG fully loaded. At the end of the corridor, was a large door, and just beyond it was the marker he had put down as the CIC. The door was pulsing red, meaning it was completely locked.

He stuck two grenades onto the door, and took up position on one side of the door while Jerome took the other side and Douglas stood near the center of the corridor, RPG aimed squarely at the door. As soon as the five second mark for the plasma grenades ticked off and exploded, enveloping the door in a brilliant shower of burnt magnesium, he and Jerome immediately stuck their gauntleted fingers and forced the loosened doors open a few centimeters. Douglas immediately stuck the muzzle of the RPG through the crack and shot off several rounds. Thumps reverberated through the floor and the door as the grenades exploded. He reloaded as Fred and Jerome forced the door open further, just as a double-flash of red light from Linda winked across their HUDs and the floor buckled a bit as something enormous came charging down the corridor.

Two enormous red splotches of enemy contacts graced the edge of Fred’s tracker just as he turned and saw what exactly was barreling down towards them. “Hunters! Move!” he shouted, and dove out of the way, just as the hissing sound of one of the Hunter’s enormous plasma cannons shredded the air and blasted the CIC’s door into dust. He was blinded for a second and when he recovered, Douglas was no where to be seen. Jerome had dodged in time, and he was already rolling up and dodging the second Hunter-pair’s cannon blast.

He jumped and rolled out of the way just as another sickly green plasma blast burned a three meter hole in the wall where he had been, spraying a quick burst of angry red lances from his plasma rifle into the nearest hulking beast. The sounds of grenades exploding into the back of the beast caused it to roar angrily as it swung its shield around to deflect the incoming grenades from Douglas who had miraculously leapt to the other side. It gave Fred the small chance to prime at least another plasma grenade and chuck it into the exposed orange torso of the Hunter’s back, as he dodged yet another cannon blast from the other Hunter.

Jerome primed a grenade and threw it into the other Hunter, but it stuck onto its enormous shield and exploded with no effect. The successfully stuck-to-the-back Hunter’s grenade exploded, crippling it and shredding part of its armor off, but did not kill it. However, it was now livid, and immediately turned and charged, just as its partner charged towards Douglas. Jerome threw another primed plasma grenade at the second Hunter, while several bullets from Linda’s sniper rifle tore into the shredded Hunter’s back as it tried to box Fred into a corner.

Fred gritted his teeth as he desperately tried to find an opening to get away from the Hunter trying to corner him. Just before the Hunter could swing its massive shield in a lateral arc to gut him, the high-speed bullets that ricocheted through the eel colony of the Hunter finally did their damage, and the beast collapsed only a meter away from where he was.

There was another explosion as the grenade that Jerome had stuck onto the second Hunter exploded, and it gave an ear-shattering howl for both its fallen mate, and in anger, as it attempted to swat Douglas with its shield, only successfully swatting the RPG out of the Spartan’s hands. It turned and hunkered down near the wall, its shield covering almost its entire body while its massive cannon started to glow green as it charged up. However, the ship rumbled and the wall that the Hunter was up against suddenly exploded with a bone-rattling force, forcing the Hunter forward as it pitched down. Multiple green lances from a Covenant fuel rod gun pounded into its back and with a final dying hiss, the enormous beast collapsed in a heap.

Out of the pouring, acrid smoke and new passage that was created, Kelly stepped through, hauling the fuel rod gun on her shoulder. “Am I late?” she asked over their localized TEAMCOM as she reloaded the cannon.

Fred was glad to see her, and a double green of all-clear from Linda let him relax just a smidge. Instead of answering her quip, he asked, “Ship status?”

“Got to go back. Still trying to carve a hole to where the bulk of the invasion force is. They’re funneling through several locked service corridors on the ship to the Forerunner vessel on two levels now,” Kelly replied.

A check of his tracker showed nothing again, not even when he glanced back into the CIC, seeing several dead Brutes littering the place. “Blue-two, -three, and –five, you’re staying here. They’re going to charge the CIC to try to flee when they realize that they’re not going to be able to take the Forerunner ship. We’re not letting them leave to bring reinforcements. Kelly, you’re with me. Time to box them in.” Four acknowledgement lights winked in response.

“Here you go, Douglas,” Kelly said as she threw the fuel rod gun to the Spartan who caught it and swiped two fingers over his faceplate in the Spartan smile before hefting the weapon and the dented grenade launcher.

While Jerome and Douglas set up shop just beyond the doors to the CIC, he and Kelly outfitted themselves with what little weapons were here, with him handing Kelly one of the blood-red plasma rifles. The needler that he had been carrying was still secured, and he double checked the amount of needles it had left before switching his plasma rifle for the needler.

The two of them entered the alternate corridor, with Kelly taking the lead, and as they descended into the massive amounts of charred wires carved out by grenades and spent fuel rod blasts, silence enveloped them. But that silence was short-lived as the squeaks of Grunts and the squawks of Jackals were heard. There were a few roars of the Brutes too, but again, no Elites, who would have maintained better discipline over their troops. The two of them managed to wriggle themselves through a massive tangle of wires and circuitry before they came to a vent that was adjacent to the corridor they could hear the troops trying to get into the area where the access to the Forerunner ship had been funneled to two points.

Kelly roughly kicked the vent open and hauled herself through, and Fred followed. His motion tracker showed nothing, and there was no curious squeak from the Grunts who were usually attracted to all sort of strange noises. They snuck down the corridor as the retort of gunfire, along with plasma rounds started to get louder. His COM squealed in his ear as the localized frequency tuned into another and he heard Tom, Lucy, and Lieutenant Hattersfield over the frequency.

He tapped Kelly and she stopped and turned a bit. Gesturing with a wide arc of his arm, along with two fingers, he mimed the lob signal and got a nod of acknowledgement from her. They split off and he silently hurried to the other end of the corridor. He crouched and took out two plasma grenades. Priming them, he popped out from his hiding spot and lobbed it as far as he could, straight into the horde that was trying to funnel through to the Forerunner ship. Whether or not it was luck, one of the plasma grenades stuck to a Brute, while the second one happened to get stuck onto a Grunt that had a belt-full of grenades. Kelly’s grenades happened to stick onto two Brutes. The cacophony of noise stopped for an instant before the angry roar of the Brutes almost drowned out terrified cries of the Grunts, before they were cut off by the explosions and secondary explosions from the amount of grenades the stuck Grunt had been carrying.

Both he and Kelly leapt out of hiding and mowed down what was left of this invading block of forces. Shards of pink embedded themselves the Jackals and Grunts as they exploded only seconds later, and Fred pulled out his plasma rifle, unleashing a full barrage of red lances at a Brute before the rifle overheated. He followed that barrage with an entire round of needles. The explosive force of the needles downed the Brute as he dropped the overheated plasma rifle and picked up the double-bladed-gun-like weapon that the Brute dropped.

Hails of foot-long white spikes shot out from the weapon as he pulled the trigger and tracked the fleeing Grunts, while Kelly pummeled a few Jackals before unloading the green bolts of a carbine onto the rest of the Jackals. Fred kept himself moving, never trying to stay in one place, since he didn’t have that extra protection that his shields had initially afforded him.

A spike-like grenade flew over his head and embedded itself in the wall behind him and he rolled forward, narrowly missing several plasma grenades lobbed at him. Those Grunts that had threw the plasma grenades had spikes embedded through their skulls a split second later, while the last rounds in his needler were impaled into the Brute who had thrown the spike-grenade.

His proximity to the combined grenade explosion forced him to the ground, but Kelly immediately rushed up to the Brute and slammed into the creature as it roared and tried to swipe at her with its meaty fists. She was quicker and dodged before shoving the carbine into its face and pulled the trigger. It fell over dead and headless, the last of the invasion forces for this section.

The disjointed report of weapons firing beyond the burnt hole that attached this section of the ship to the Forerunner ship alerted him to the fact that there were still Covenant forces inside. He snatched up a fresh plasma rifle and a dropped carbine. But just as he and Kelly charged through, there was a massive explosion that shook even the oddly muffled floor of the Forerunner ship, and then everything fell silent. Nothing showed up on his motion tracker, and even when he boosted his aural sensors to maximum, there was still nothing.

A barely audible squeak a few meters down the Forerunner corridor that was liberally covered in phosphorescent blood and dark streaks of explosives caused him to point his plasma rifle at the source. A gauntleted hand snaked out from underneath a downed Brute, and the dead mass shook a bit. He hurried over to it and together with Kelly; they heaved the dead mass off the trapped soldier, only to reveal Lucy, who had been trapped underneath the hulking creature when it died.

Her biosigns were convoluted, but as soon as the young Spartan shook her head, they cleared, but she was injured, judging from the way she was favoring her right leg as she got up and gave a nod of thanks to him and Kelly. However, she didn’t immediately pick up a weapon and instead, hurried over to where there was a pile of Covenant bodies, among them at least two Brutes, and Fred saw another hand weakly flailing about, trapped under the heavy pile.

With a great deal of effort, the three of them managed to roll the bodies off, freeing the trapped soldier. Though Fred was relieved to see that Lieutenant Hattersfield had survived under that heavy pile of bodies, her biosigns were troubling. “Ma’am,” he said over TEAMCOM, extending a hand to help her up. She accepted it and unsteadily rose, though after a moment, her biosigns seemed to perk up a bit more though she moved a bit sluggishly to pick up an assault rifle.

“Tom?” she asked over TEAMCOM.

Fred shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know where the other young Spartan was, though he did see Lucy mime a large explosion while gesturing to the adjacent corridor. TEAMCOM crackled again, and this time, Jerome’s cool and controlled voice came over, saying, “They’re storming the CIC. We’ve got a nice barbeque party going.”

“Copy,” Lieutenant Hattersfield said. To Fred and Kelly, she said, “Clean out the rest here and below. Jake and the rest of his team are still there. Help them seal the hole. Lucy and I will take care of the decks above.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, giving her a curt nod.

 

Ribs fractured from the heavy pile of bodies made each breath that Leigh took in feel like a stab of a serrated blade cutting into her flesh. Coupled with that was all her other injuries that she had sustained in the intense firefight, but she pushed that entire wash of pain aside, and hurried down the twisting corridors of the Forerunner ship with Lucy trailing behind her. The assault rifle that she held against her had been picked up from one of the dead Marines lying in the corridors, but as she turned the corner, she skidded to a halt.

An enormous hole had torn up the corridor leading to the teleportation device, making it impossible for her or Lucy to jump the distance without falling through. She glanced over the edge – the hole sank at least three floors deep, but down below, she saw Tom’s body in a small crater that he had created in the floor when he had landed. The illumination was flickering quite badly, making it hard for her to clearly identify if he was moving or not, but as soon as she pointed her helmet down, his biosign showed up on her HUD, though it didn’t look good.

However, something flickered over her motion tracker, and she thought she saw a shimmering outline of a cloaked Brute wandering around the level where Tom was lying. A small movement from Lucy next to her confirmed the fact, and as she adjusted the polarization in her helmet, she finally saw the faint blur of the Brute, and a twitch that indicated that Tom was starting to become alert. She tapped Lucy and indicated her plan to her, and the young Spartan handed her a plasma grenade, giving her a curt nod.

Bracing herself, she silently unsheathed the Corsica-carbide combat blade strapped to her boot and leapt down. Lucy followed her a split second later as she sank the blade into the neck of the Brute, right where the helmet and the body armor of the beast did not cover the beast. It roared, and she immediately yanked out the blade and smashed the primed plasma grenade into the Brute as it lurched, throwing her off. She slammed into the corridor’s far wall and saw black stars explode before her eyes. She shook her head to clear it as best as possible as the muffled steps of the charging Brute rushed at her.

However, the Brute never got to her as the grenade exploded, blowing its head off and showering her in a combination of blood, chunks of flesh, and pieces of armor. She shook her head once more, this time mostly to get the chunks off her as she sheathed the combat blade and stood while fresh pain bloomed down her back. Lucy had successfully dragged Tom back from the proximity of the grenade, shielded him and was now injecting biofoam into his wounds. As soon as the biofoam took hold, Leigh saw the young Spartan’s biosign perk.

Moments later, Tom rose with the help of Lucy, and she asked, “Status?”

“I can shoot, ma’am,” he replied, though she heard the strain in his voice.

She handed him a plasma rifle and said, “We’re storming the upper levels.”

Two acknowledgement lights winked across her HUD and they hurried to the teleportation device. Jerrod had not successfully locked down the levels and it had forced Jake to send some of the Marines back up to defend the scientists. She just hoped that some of the scientists had survived.

Level three was eerily silent when they arrived, but there were some splashes of purplish blood mixing with phosphorescent blood, along with a few splatters of red blood that decorated the corridors as they silently traversed through. Leigh suddenly held up a fist, halting Tom and Lucy as she thought she heard the faint noise of gunfire. She listened closely and indeed there was, and it was not coming from this deck, but the floor above. She winked a single red light to her teammates and they sprinted as fast as they could around the twisting corridors until they ran up the ramp to the second level.

Upon bursting into the corridors and their adjacent chambers where the heart of the firefight was, Leigh saw the last man standing, defending those scientists who were still alive and firing their weapons.

A pile of dead Covenant soldiers lay on the ground where Chief Mendez was incessantly firing, with smoking casings littered all around him small piles. Drs. Mosely, Reinhart, and Halsey were huddled behind the Covenant pile, occasionally popping their head up to shoot a few rounds, though it was mostly Dr. Mosely who was doing the shooting. Captain Cutter was no where to be seen, and last Leigh had heard, he was arming the HAVOK warhead in the event that the Covenant did succeed in overtaking the ship.

She signaled for her teammates to go around the other side of the corridor to ambush the Covenant who was being funneled into the point that Chief Mendez was creating. They hurried through several twists and turns, and as soon as they heard the squawks of Jackals up ahead, they primed several grenades and lobbed them towards the corner. Fragmentations bounced while the plasma adhered to the side walls. The resulting explosion shook the frame of the corridor.

Lances of green and red popped out as soon as the grenades cleared, forcing Leigh onto the deck while Lucy dove into an alcove and Tom melted into an adjacent corridor. Even on her belly, Leigh fired two quick bursts as the enemy forces advanced, downing two Grunts. Both Lucy and Tom alternated popping out of their hiding places, splattering the Covenant soldiers left and right. Priming her last grenade, she rolled to her feet and chucked it. The Jackals scattered, but two more grenades from Lucy and they were crowded in. Even with their personal shields, the explosion tore the Jackals apart, and Leigh leapt forward, picking up a carbine.

She fired in quick, rapid succession, downing several Grunts before unloading the rest of the rounds in the carbine at the Brute who charged her from the end of the hall. She heard one word over TEAMCOM from Tom who shouted, “Duck!”

Throwing herself flat to the ground, three plasma grenades sailed over her head and stuck onto the incoming Brute. But before the Brute exploded, Drones who had been following behind the beast swarmed and rushed towards them. A steady stream of red plasma bolts and gunfire from an assault rifle peppered the Drones as she discarded the empty carbine and pull out her pistol. Each shot she made struck the Drones, who were busy dodging the hail of bullets from Tom and Lucy, were either in the head or their body and they fell like squashed bugs to the floor.

As soon as the last of the Drones fell, Leigh rolled onto her feet while scooping up a shotgun that had been blown from a Marine’s fingers. She checked the amount of ammo as they surged forward, intent on cornering the last of the Covenant forces on this level in crossfire between them and Chief Mendez. She rushed around the corner, just in time to witness a slight fuzz of a cloaked Brute charging down the opposite end of the corridor.

Even with the augmentations they had in their bodies, the three of them could not react fast enough to stop what happened next. Leigh instantly reacted by pumping several rounds from the shotgun into the Brute, as time seemed to slow down for her. Unfazed by the bullets biting into its armor and its cloaking failing, she saw the Brute overwhelm Chief Mendez, even as her father tried to dodge while pushing the scientists out of the way.

_No!_

The bladed tip of the Brute’s RPG gutted Chief Mendez as she primed a plasma grenade and threw it with all her might.

Flinging the Chief’s body away like a rag doll, she heard an inarticulate cry over the COM, barely realizing that it was both her own howl of rage combined with Tom’s as the three of them charged towards the Brute. The plasma grenade stuck on the Brute’s armor and blew it off, leaving only patches of fur. It swung its RPG towards them, but two close-ranged shotgun rounds and a short burst of plasma and rifle fire later, it toppled over, dead.

Leigh’s heart constricted as she ran towards her father’s body, but as she dropped to her knees, she knew that what they did was too late. Bubbles of blood foamed out of her father’s mouth and the light in his eyes slowly died. She gently picked him up and set his head on her knees, closing his lifeless eyes as she shook a bit, struggling to maintain control over her emotions.

The indomitable Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez, who had trained generations of Spartans, was dead.

 

~*~*~*~


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 0700 hours, December 3, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, Librae Tauri system, edge of known Covenant-controlled space.

 

The total count for the dead had halved the entire population of those who had survived Onyx and the _Spirit of Fire_. All the Marines except for Team November had been lost in the intense firefight. Drs. Yelchin and Solev, along with the assistant Neil Rousseau, had also been lost when the Covenant forces had nearly overwhelmed the third level. Three Spartans had been lost in the fight: Alice, Mark, and Chief Mendez. The only two people that had escaped the entire battle relatively unscathed were Captain Cutter and Professor Anders, both of whom had been in the holo-projection chamber, wrestling control of the ship from the rampant AI, Serina.

The AI had been successfully rendered inoperable on several systems, but had not been completely shut down.

Injuries that virtually the entire crew had sustained had forced them to remain in this system, though after hours of decoding the Covenant network, the AI Jerrod had declared the battle cruiser to be an independent ship. Still, the atmosphere was tense, but it was slowly giving way to bone-numbing fatigue.

Fred was still on edge enough that it helped dull the shock of loosing his teammates and the Marines, the latter of which had surprised him a bit that he had cared enough about them, and especially the loss of Chief Mendez. Like the others, deep down, he had surprisingly always held on to the belief that Chief Mendez was invincible, but that reality had been shattered. He had not been present, but he blamed himself for not being there when the Chief and the Marines had been sent there to defend the rest of the scientists. There were too many ‘ifs’ that rolled through his head, too many scenarios that could have played out that might have saved the others who had died.

He abruptly cut those thoughts off. None of them had a monopoly on hard times and what could have happened. It was pointless to speculate on the past.

Captain Cutter had ordered him to report to Dr. Halsey to get patched up, but he knew that the doctor had been working non-stop for the last twelve hours since the end of the battle, patching up the more seriously injured survivors. He wasn’t bleeding to death yet, and the biofoam that he had injected into himself would hold for a while longer. He just didn’t move his left arm too much when he had helped Linda haul the bodies to a central location. They would burn the bodies soon in a large pyre, to counter the possible threat of Flood-forms on the Forerunner ship.

The possibility of Flood life forms lurking in the deep corners of the ship was still a threat that hung over their heads. At their current operational status, they certainly did not have the manpower to do a thorough sweep of the ship.

Phosphorescent blood mixed with dark streaks of explosive residue, trails of other Covenant soldiers, and dried Human blood still stained the corridors of the Forerunner ship as he walked through them towards the teleportation device. However, as he turned a corner, he saw Lieutenant Hattersfield standing near the corner of an adjacent corridor to this one a little down the ways.

Her helmet was still on, but was bent down a bit as she looked at something in her hand. As he approached, he saw that it was a handful of spent brass casings in her hand. The ground underneath her was littered with spent casings, and he realized that this particular place was where Chief Mendez had died, heroically defending Dr. Halsey and the other surviving scientists.

He stopped and stood next to her, surveying the floor that was still stained with the blood of the Brute that had killed Chief Mendez, mixed with the darkening stain of Human blood. He remembered that Lieutenant Hattersfield had extended a small sliver of trust and possible friendship between the two of them when she had told him that Chief Mendez was her father. Had that been only a month ago?

He tried to search for the right words, to articulate the loss he…his team; what he felt about the loss of Chief Mendez to her, but failed. He had never been good with expressing sentiments. Though he wasn’t sure if it was a breach of protocol since she was his commanding officer, he placed his right hand on her armored shoulder, hoping that the action would convey the loss he felt for, in his opinion, one of the greatest soldiers to serve in the UNSC.

“He left when I was about six or seven,” she suddenly spoke up over a private COM channel to him. “I never knew him well enough, but I see his legacy reflected in you and the other Spartans, even when he disappeared again to train the SPARTAN-IIIs.”

She abruptly fell silent and clicked the private frequency off. However, the COM crackled again as another private frequency resolved itself, and this time, Dr. Halsey’s tired voice sounded over his ears, saying, “Fred, you haven’t checked in yet. Please come down to the bio-stasis room now.”

He lifted his hand off Lieutenant Hattersfield’s shoulder and keyed the private COM frequency, saying, “Yes, ma’am.”

Turning back around, he walked away, towards the corridor ramp that would take him to the bio-stasis chamber. When he entered the chamber, he saw Jake, Olivia, Tom, and the two Marines of Team November, lying sedated on the tables. Dr. Reinhart was moving between Olivia and Jake while Professor Anders was monitoring one of the Marines.

As soon as he entered, Dr. Halsey looked up from where she was standing next to Tom and gestured for him to sit on one of the empty tables. Moments later, she came over and wordlessly, held up her hand-held scanner, panning it over him. He saw the barely imperceptible frown appear on her face as she studied the readouts on the scanner.

“Some internal bleeding and a few fractured ribs,” she murmured as she put the scanner aside. “It will also take a longer amount of time for your shoulder to completely heal, though I highly doubt that we may have that luxury if there are Flood-forms on this vessel. Please lie down.”

He complied, unhooking the assault rifle that was on his back and placed it on the table next to him as she fell silent and rubbed her temples for a few seconds. Without another word, she picked up a pair of giant clamps lying on one of the table and proceeded to pry a part of the torso section of his armor off. His armor automatically powered off as soon as there was a disconnect, and the near-whisper of the ambient hum of the armor that he had long gotten used to died away. Local anesthesia was injected into him, but he could still hear the muffled hum and scrapes of the instruments Dr. Halsey was using to stop the bleeding and patch up his wounds.

He remembered a long time ago when the AI that had taught them when they had been children, Déja, had said that some found silence to be maddening. He never really understood what she had meant by that, for the times where the silence was welcomed and when it was a sign that there was trouble. The silence beyond the ambient noise that was filtering through his helmet was a welcomed one right now as he stared through his faceplate at the ceiling.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” the sounds of one of the Marines punctured the silence, his wail rising with each repetition of the words.

Fred nearly rose up, but a firm push back down from Dr. Halsey prevented him as he finally registered the sluggish movements of his body. She had injected him with both a local anesthetic and sedated him enough that he couldn’t resist a simple push, even with his augmented reflexes. A flash of irritation cross his mind as he glanced down and to the side, seeing Professor Anders turn her attention to the panicking Marine.

“My leg!” the Marine screamed as Professor Anders hurriedly tried to find a sedative injection in the medical supplies that were scattered around the chamber. “My fucking leg is missing!” the Marine screamed again.

Fred felt something cold fill the cavity of his body as Dr. Halsey injected some biofoam into him to temporarily stop whatever she had been doing. She quickly walked over to where Professor Anders was, plucked a hypodermic needle and calmly walked over to the Marine who was weakly flailing about. Though the Marine tried to bat the two women’s hands away, Dr. Halsey still managed to inject the sedative into the Marine. The Marine fell limp moments later and Dr. Halsey simply walked back to continue her operation.

What felt like hours later, Dr. Halsey closed the compartments of his armor that she had extracted, the chest one being the hardest, since parts of it had fused to his skin. He turned the software on as a clean operational diagnosis scrolled through his HUD, the familiar hum back in his ears. Well, the diagnosis was mostly clean. His shields were still not active. He could feel the stitching and the fused parts of his newly healed wounds stretch a bit as he shifted a tiny bit. As he glanced over at the doctor and gave her a nod of thanks, he could see the exhaustion clearly on her face. She needed rest, but it didn’t look like she was going to go off and sleep anytime soon.

“We should rest,” she murmured almost inaudibly. “We shouldn’t be running around, not when we’ve lost so much…” In a more normal tone, she said, “I’m sorry Fred. Unless you can happen to find a Covenant Engineer on the battle cruiser and have it repair your shields the same way that one did for John, your shields will be completely inoperable.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, “Thank you, ma’am.”

“ _Try_ to avoid strenuous movement for the next few days, Lieutenant,” she said in a crisp, business-like voice.

“Will do, ma’am,” he said, as he got off the table and walked out of the chamber.

Once he was outside, he clicked to Blue Team’s TEAMCOM and asked, “Kelly, status?”

“Found a few gas bags down here in the engineering section of the Covenant ship, sir,” she replied. “No enemy contacts. Looks like Jerome and Douglas’s barbeque party grilled them all. Should I bring one up to repair the armors?”

“Do it,” he replied, then said, “Jerome, status?”

“We’ve collected a lot of weaponry, sir. Lucy’s trying to sort through them all, but I’m estimating a good amount to hold the fort for at least two days, not counting the ammo we have left for the Human weapons. Combined, I’m roughly estimating a good five-day shootout.”

“Good. Kelly, bring two engineers up. Maybe one of them can fix some of the weapons,” he said. “Ash, status?”

“We’re on the twenty-fifth level right now, sir,” the young Spartan said. As soon as both Ash and Douglas had been patched up, Fred had sent them down the levels of the Forerunner ship to make doubly sure that there were no more transient Covenant contacts. They also had the explicit orders to not engage in any sort of combat with the Flood, if they happened to find them.

“No contacts so far,” Ash reported the rest of his team’s status.

“Copy. Linda, status?”

There was a distinct pause through the COM before Linda said, “One of the Hunters’ bodies is missing. It wasn’t dragged away either.”

Despite the regulating temperature in his armor, Fred felt a distinct chill crawl down his spine. He was sure that they had killed both monsters; otherwise Jerome, Douglas, and Linda would have been overwhelmed when the Covenant had stormed the CIC in their desperate attempt to flee. While Linda had been mostly working on clearing the bodies from the Covenant ship that was still attached to the Forerunner ship, he had been hauling the bodies from the Forerunner ship.

Did the Flood infiltrate and assimilate itself into the Hunter? Worst-case scenario, it did, and if it did, then they had a problem. A really big problem.

“Linda, get back to the central location on the double! Start burning those bodies. Kelly, get the engineers up to the holo-chamber aye-sap. Jerome and Lucy, forget the weapons collection. We need a sweep of the Covenant ship. Kelly, go with them as soon as you’ve dropped your package. Ash and Douglas, I’ll join you in a minute,” he ordered, sprinting as fast as he could towards the weapons room.

Acknowledgement lights dotted his HUD and he changed frequencies to ping both Captain Cutter and Lieutenant Hattersfield. “Sir, ma’am, we may have a containment problem. One of the Hunters’ bodies is missing and it wasn’t dragged away either. Possible Flood-form involved. Recommend evac-ing all personnel to decks one and two, including those in the Slipspace pods while my teams search the ships,” he said as he dashed into the weapons room and grabbed a few extra clips for his assault rifle that hung on his back, and attached two SMGs to his waist and grabbed a few clips for those.

The grenades had been laid out in neat rows, but a few had been knocked from the lines, judging from how fast Jerome and Lucy had reacted. His COM crackled a bit as Captain Cutter’s voice, tight with emotion, said, “Copy. I’m sending Dr. Mosely down to help with the evacuation. Lieutenant Hattersfield will join one of the teams as soon as she’s confirmed the body count in the pyre location.”

“Sir, they should already be burning, if not soon, sir,” he replied, as he ran out of the weapons room and towards the teleportation device on the second level.

“Good,” the captain replied before a squeal burst through as the captain changed frequencies to BROADCOM and said, “All personnel in the bio-stasis room, immediate evacuation to level two is in order. Slipspace pods must also be evacuated. We have a possible contact situation with Flood-forms.”

As soon as the teleportation device transported him down to the level that Ash and Douglas were on, his faceplate’s polarization automatically lightened to compensate for the dim illumination that covered this level of the ship. Two green lights winked up on his HUD as he saw the barely perceptible shadow of Ash in his camouflaged SPI armor and the liquid mercury-like movements of Douglas approach him.

“North and east side are clear, sir,” Ash said. “Nothing on tracker and no strange external noise either.”

“West and south it is,” he said, nodding as they moved out and he took point, boosting his aural sensors to maximum until he could hear the faint heartbeats of the other two as they flanked him. His motion tracker pulsed no contacts, but as they carefully searched each corridor and chamber, sweeping both headlamps and guns around the dimly illuminated level, there was nothing.

On the thirtieth level, Lieutenant Hattersfield joined their team, bringing grim news from the decks above. The bodies were burning, but Jerrod was maintaining extra control over that particular section, due to the fact that the AI had detected several attempted intrusions into the system. It was not by Serina, but by another construct. Both Drs. Mosely and Halsey were working on counter intrusion upgrades for Jerrod, while seeing if they could attempt to rectify the rampancy in Serina and bring her back. Linda was also assisting the team aboard the Covenant battle cruiser. Lieutenant Hattersfield had also confirmed that there were indeed, missing bodies from the pyre, mostly Covenant, but also the bodies of Alice, Mark, and Chief Mendez.

The Lieutenant’s tone was as cold as Linda’s tone when she was in her Zen no-thought state, when the Lieutenant had told them about the missing bodies. Fred had also noticed that her biosigns had slowly dropped to a lower heartbeat, almost as if she were deliberately dropping her heart rate. The only other time he remembered someone deliberately slowing their heart rate down while getting ready for combat was when he was still training on Reach. During one of the hand-to-hand combat sessions that Chief Mendez had overseen, the Chief had deliberately picked on Kelly enough to anger her and cause her to lash out at the Chief in retaliation. But with heart rate monitors attached to all of them, instead of the Chief’s heart speeding up with each dodge he made to avoid Kelly’s attacks, it was slowly dropping down. At its lowest point, the Chief had lashed out faster than they could follow and felled Kelly.

He blinked as he brought himself out of his thoughts. He had to focus on the mission on hand. Now was not the time to linger on the past.

Four more levels were completely cleared, but Fred couldn’t help wondering if the Flood were populating the levels they had cleared as they continued down. There was nothing over the COM from Kelly or her team yet.

Suddenly, Ash held up a fist and they halted, listening carefully. At first, there was only silence that was punctured by the faint heartbeats of Fred’s teammates, filtered into his ears from the boosted aural sensors, but moments later, he _thought_ he heard the distinct scrape of _something_ scrape softly against the muffled metal. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Douglas turn a bit and silently move to the left a bit, while Lieutenant Hattersfield moved towards the right.

Just as he saw Ash minutely relax, Lieutenant Hattersfield shouted, “Fred, Douglas, behind you!” Instead of shooting at what was behind their backs, she brought her shotgun up towards the ceiling vent and pumped several rounds into it, catching the Flood that was trying to ambush them from above.

Fred whirled around and fired without another thought at the massive wave of tiny bulbous creatures that suddenly poured out of the vent only a couple of steps from where he was. The creatures popped, riddled with rifle bullets as he swept the weapon back and forth, but more kept coming as he and the rest of the team kept firing while moving back. His rifle’s counter quickly ran to zero, and he ejected the clip and slapped in a fresh one and continued to hold the trigger down. From Dr. Halsey’s briefing on the Flood taken from Cortana’s data, these were only the infection forms.

“Flood contact!” he barely heard the lieutenant shout over BROADCOM over the heavy amount of gunfire. “Repeat, Flood contact!”

Though his motion tracker was washed in blood-red dots of the infection form, two large dots suddenly showed up in the peripherals, and Fred saw out of the corner of his eyes, lumbering carrier forms coming towards them from one of the corridors perpendicular to this one. “Carrier forms at three-o-clock,” he said over TEAMCOM.

“Don’t let them get too close or else they’ll explode,” Douglas said, his voice still calm, though Fred clearly heard the undercurrent of stress that accompanied the Spartan’s slightly elevated biosigns.

Two shotgun blasts from Lieutenant Hattersfield prematurely detonated the carrier forms, sending many infection forms flying in the air, towards them. The tiny Flood forms were quickly cut down into pieces. A few more short bursts of gunfire later downed the rest of the infection forms and there were no more red dots that showed up on Fred’s tracker.

He ejected the spent clip in his rifle and slammed in a new one while taking a few steps forward from their gathered position near the intersection of corridors and listened very carefully. Silence and the slightly elevated heartbeats of his teammates filtered through. There were no other strange noises from where he was standing. However, just as he was about to tap into COM and ask for the status of the team that was aboard the Covenant ship, the floor underneath him suddenly and violently lurched, toppling him to his knees.

Douglas and Lieutenant Hattersfield both slammed into the walls while Ash stumbled and fell backwards, but all of them quickly regained their balance when the sudden movement stopped as quickly as it had come. That had felt like a Slipspace jump; he was sure of it as he heard Lieutenant Hattersfield key the COM and said, “Captain, what’s happened?”

Silence answered her question and she repeated it, but again, there was no answer. Moments later, the floor violently shook again, but this time, they braced the walls of the corridor and stood their ground. Another Slipspace jump had been initiated. Even before the movement ceased, the Lieutenant said over TEAMCOM, “Teleporter, now!”

All of them turned and sprinted as fast as they could through the maze of corridors, just as infection forms burst out of several vents and scurried after them. Fred balanced himself as best as he could while the floor under him pitched again in yet another sudden Slipspace jump. Slowing down, he turned and swept his rifle back and forth in short bursts of fire before hooking it onto his back and unclipped the SMGs on his waist. Mowing down several layers of the infection form that was almost nipping at the heels of Ash and Lieutenant Hattersfield, he gave them some breathing space as the two sprinted by.

“Combat forms, dead ahead!” Douglas shouted over COM before Fred heard a grunt accompany the announcement along with the muffled explosion of a grenade.

Fred kept facing the oncoming infection horde while taking steps back and staggered his rate of fire so that he was consistently pouring bullets into the forms without a pause to reload. Risking a quick glance backwards, he saw Ash unloading dual plasma rifle fire at carrier forms that were waddling down an adjacent corridor, his rifle hooked on his back. Douglas and the lieutenant were dealing with the combat forms that had swarmed into the corridor, preventing them from moving any closer to the teleporter. He set his jaw as he reloaded one of his SMGs and kept firing, tracking and bursting several carrier forms that were approaching them. At this rate, they were going to run out of ammunition before they even made it to the teleporter.

“What the hell is that?!” he heard Ash say over COM before the young Spartan shouted, “Lieutenant…sir, duck!”

Fred dropped to his knees, stopping his fire for just a brief second that caused a few of the infection forms to swarm before he resumed fire and they popped only a meter away from him. Several enormous spikes, longer and thicker than what the Brute spike weapon produced sailed over where his head used to be and imbedded itself into the wall. He glanced out of the corner of his eyes to see a strange-looking Flood form down the corridor that Ash was situated in, that had not been in Cortana’s files. It looked like it was sitting on a tripod of legs and had a long, triangular stalk sticking up from the middle of the tripod that was covered in an enormous amount of spikes.

He rolled to the side to duck another hail of spikes as Ash chucked two grenades at the prone Flood form before sweeping a short burst of plasma fire at the ranged Flood form. It exploded in a spectacular fashion, but more carrier, infection, and this time, combat forms in the disguise of dead Covenant soldiers were lumbering towards them; a seemingly unending wave of Flood forms after Flood forms.

The ground beneath them shook again, swaying all over the place as yet another jump took place, but he kept his aim as steady as possible. One of the combat forms that were approaching suddenly leapt the distance and landed almost right on top of him as he backed up two steps. Fred raked half a clip into the Brute-mutated-combat form, shredding it apart. He lashed out with a vicious kick, sending it back into a carrier form that was hurrying towards them like a suicide runner. The carrier form exploded, but he tracked the tiny forms with his guns and wiped the walls clean.

“Punch a hole, Douglas!” he heard Lieutenant Hattersfield shout.

Several muffled explosions punctured the gunfire-filled air, but before any of them could move towards the opening created, they were enveloped in sudden darkness.

 

* * *

 

Being jostled around on the second level of the Forerunner ship was disconcerting as Jake got painfully up from the floor for the fourth time and ran as fast as he could to the holo-chamber, despite the intense pain that flared up along his freshly healed wounds. They had lost contact with the team that was in the depths of the Forerunner ship, and the teleporters had been mysteriously locked out, preventing them from going to the lower levels. They had received word just moments before the third jump from Kelly who said that the Covenant ship was clear of Flood forms. Jake had found it miraculous that the Covenant ship had stayed attached to the Forerunner ship throughout all the wild jumps it had made.

He knew that Captain Cutter would not do such a thing and when he finally arrived at the holo-chamber, he found Drs. Mosely and Halsey at the main console with their laptops hooked up to it, furiously typing away at the maelstrom of Forerunner symbols swirling on the screens and the spherical projector. Captain Cutter was at the structural console, and he quickly approached his commanding officer.

“Goddamn,” the captain muttered, “they’re everywhere.”

“Sir, do you know what’s causing these jumps? Do you know where we are?” he asked as he stared at the overwhelming amount of red dots that flooded the lower levels of the Forerunner ship. Just before they lost contact with the team below decks, Jake had caught a transmission from Leigh saying that they had confirmed contact with Flood-forms.

“No,” the captain said. “There are a lot of debris strewn about outside in space though, as if something massive had been destroyed. Jerrod only has control over life support. We’re trying to get control over teleportation to evacuate to the Covenant ship.”

[ _I may be able to help_.]

Jake blinked and stepped back a bit as those golden words suddenly appeared on the structural projection screen then faded as quickly as they appeared. He glanced at Captain Cutter and found the captain’s eyes also wide in surprise.

“So I’m not the only one who has hallucinated that sentence?” he muttered.

[ _Hallucinations are only a product of an overactive imagination_.]

“Doctor Halsey, Doctor Mosely, what ever you are doing to the structural console, stop,” Captain Cutter said. “We need that teleporter online, now.”

“Do what? We’re trying to get that teleporter online,” Dr. Mosely huffed a bit as she briefly looked up before returning to her work while Dr. Halsey ignored everything and continued with her part of the work.

[ _They are, but as long as the Combined Form has control over_ her _, they will never succeed. I may be able to help_.]

“Who…what are you?” Captain Cutter tentatively asked, placing both hands on the console and leaning a bit forward.

“Sir,” Tom’s voice came over COM, “we’ve jumped again.”

[ _What has lied dormant for millennia on end in the shadow of one of the many worlds my creators could not find shelter to, I betray again. I have already helped one of my descendants in the remnant of the Ark you had stumbled upon and I shall gladly do it again and again until the billions that I have sinned against are at rest. I’ll tell you who I am. I am Mendicant Bias_.]

 

~*~*~*~


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 2015 hours, December 3, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Forerunner ship, system traverse from Installation 00 to UNSC-controlled space.

 

Leigh stumbled a bit when her feet found solid ground again, but she froze as she glanced around at what surrounded her and the rest of the Spartans. They stood back-to-back against each other, covering all four quadrants, but none of them opened fired. Surrounding them in overwhelming force was an enormous horde of Flood in all types of forms, most of them being forms that she did not recognize. The missing Hunter that Linda had reported was among them, having incredibly grotesque protrusions coming out of it, but it was clearly a combat form.

“Estimated one hundred to one odds,” Ash whispered over TEAMCOM but when a shadow descended upon them from above, blocking out the artificial light, they looked up and Ash revised his quip, saying, “Okay…very stacked odds.”

Fear mixed with utter surprise like she had never felt before gripped Leigh as she stared at the massive beast that was descending from the shadows of the ceiling of this tall chamber. From what she could see, it looked like an engorged Venus flytrap with a massive amount of tentacles and it opened its maw at them. She felt her insides rumble as a subsonic voice boomed inside her head as the _thing_ stopped only meters above their heads.

< _Why have you brought these maggots here? They have destroyed my brethren aboard the holy chariot! I need not these insects when their construct has broken!_ >

“I sensed an intruder to our systems in the last leap of faith that carried you to the void, my liege, Gravemind,” a sing-song, melodically warped voice said.

“You bastard,” Leigh hissed as she saw the familiar glowing-blue-orbed Monitor appear out from the shadow of the creature. In that instant, she made the connection between the mysterious transportation of the Section Zero personnel to the shield world instead of leaving them to their fate. It had been a deliberate act by the Monitor to save the Section Zero people and transport them straight to a spot where it knew that they would find the Flood-infested ship.

< _We are now at one of their worlds, construct._ >

“Scans indicate that this world is barren and void, Gravemind,” the Monitor replied. “We must have hostages if we are to negotiate with this intruder.”

< _Negotiate?! I am timeless and victorious while my brethren have perished in the hands of the descendants! I will not submit!_ >

“It’s getting pissed off and distracted,” Fred whispered over TEAMCOM. “Looks like that thing is controlling the Flood.”

“Good, lets blow that Venus flytrap to hell and back,” Douglas angrily said.

“Steady,” she murmured. She did not need the short-fused Spartan to go around blowing stuff up when they were surrounded by a massive amount of Flood.

< _Vermin! You shall go no where!_ >

Leigh had seen Ash take a small step forward out of the corner of her eyes and halt as the rumbling from the creature stopped him. One of its many tentacles snaked around and halted only a meter away from Ash while the Monitor flew around before settling next to the tentacle.

“I still firmly believe that we will need hostages, Gravemind. Your deconstruction of the construct is taking much too long. I am already rerouting several control functions to evade this intruder,” the Monitor said with a touch of annoyance in its sing-song voice. “I have seen these descendants of my makers. They will not sacrifice them. Infect them, and you shall have four more terrifyingly strong soldiers to lead your great army!”

< _A tempting offer, construct. I already have three…_ >

Out of the massive amount of Flood-forms that surrounded them, three distinct combat forms stepped out. Cold anger washed over Leigh as she saw Alice, Mark, and Chief Mendez in monstrous, misshapen forms lumber towards them. Only when the Monitor suddenly zipped only mere centimeters from her face, its iris glowing a dangerous red did she halt the unconscious action of lifting one of her SMGs up, her shotgun still secured to her back.

< _Seven, a number your creators loved and their descendants shall be destroyed by them. Why keep them in their frail forms when we shall have their entire race on their knees?_ >

“Over confidence is what caused your brethrens’ undoing, Gravemind,” the Monitor cautioned, continuing to hover dangerously close to Leigh’s face, its iris still glowing an angry red. “We must use caution!”

< _Pah! They have destroyed what has tracked us and we shall return the favor to them by making them stronger now!_ >

[Standby for teleport.]

Leigh blinked as she saw the words glow briefly on her HUD then disappear just as quickly as it appeared. The Monitor hovering in front of her did not seem to notice the message across her HUD as it continued to argue with the creature still hovering over their heads. However, beyond the Monitor, she saw a swarm of Flood infection forms approaching…then a wave of nausea hit her and darkness filled her vision.

 

[Reclaimers retrieved.]

“All personnel evacuate to the Covenant battle cruiser,” Captain Cutter ordered over BROADCOM as Dr. Mosely snapped her laptop shut and quickly left. The captain glanced at Dr. Halsey who was still standing next to the console, furiously typing away. “Doctor, the evacuation also pertains to you.” Just as Dr. Halsey acknowledged the order with a nod of her head but still did not move, _something_ seemed to roar loudly in Jake’s head.

He stumbled a bit but recovered and secured the HAVOK warhead from the holo-chamber and started to carry it out of the place.

“Creighton, where are you going with that warhead?” Captain Cutter asked, halting him.

“Going to hook it up to the biggest source of power on this ship, sir,” he said, turning a bit.

“That’s my job, Junior Lieutenant,” the captain said.

Before Jake could get a word of protest in, he heard the voice of Carver, one of the two Marines of Team November who had had his leg amputated after the battle with the Covenant. “With respect, sirs, they’re going to need both of you. Let a soldier who can’t even fucking move anymore die in dignity.”

Jake turned and saw the Marine being held up by his spotter-partner, Jeri, as she said, “I’ll cover him and make sure the thing is hooked up.”

There was a moment of silence before Captain Cutter reluctantly said, “You have a go, Marines. Godspeed.”

Despite the rebelliousness that surged through Jake, he reluctantly handed the warhead over to Jeri as Carver held onto one of the consoles for support and she approached Jake to take the warhead from him. “Sir,” she whispered just as she took the warhead from him, “it’s been an honor serving under your command.”

“The honor has been mine, Corporal,” he replied, stepping back.

“Jerrod, you have the remote code, do you not?” Captain Cutter asked.

“I do, sir,” the AI replied.

“Mendicant Bias, I do not know what sins you have committed, but I am ordering you to protect the AI at all costs. Jerrod, detonate the warhead as soon as it’s hooked up, even if we’re not clear of its blast radius. Doctor Halsey, why are you not on the battle cruiser yet?”

“We cannot loose the data we have acquired,” she crisply replied before something flashed on her screen, causing her to pause.

“Ma’am, please leave,” Jerrod said over the speakers just as the two Marines were transported to their destination by the remote teleportation device that the strange AI had managed to wrestle control over.

Jake closed the distance between him and the doctor and forcefully dragged her away from the console as she snapped the laptop shut. She shook him off and glared at him before straightening herself and hurried away. Jake hurried after her, pulling out his pistol as he heard Captain Cutter fall in behind them. He took point and they quickly got to the main teleporter. The captain called out for level seventeen and they were instantly transported there.

The faint sounds of gunfire caused Jake to snap up his pistol as the three of them hurried towards where the breach between the Forerunner ship and the Covenant battle cruiser. The sounds got louder as they approached and he peeked out to see Leigh and Fred situated on either side of a long corridor that was adjacent to the one leading directly to the breach, shooting at several Flood forms that were surging towards them. “Go!” he shouted to Captain Cutter and Dr. Halsey.

Popping out, he shot a few rounds from his pistol, taking out several small infection forms as the two he had been escorting ran to the ship and cross the threshold. “All personnel present and accounted for,” he said over TEAMCOM. “November stayed behind to hook up the warhead to power sources. We need to bug out.”

There was a brief pause before Leigh replied in a detached voice, “Copy.”

Jake knew that she was angry about the fact that the Marines were the ones to be staying behind to make sure that the warhead was secured for detonation. But as they ceased fired and quickly fell back to the Covenant ship, it detached from the Forerunner ship as soon as Jake confirmed them to be aboard. None of them lingered near the pressurized airlock as they ran to the bridge to observe what was about to happen.

Outside in space, above the partially glassed planet formerly known as Arcadia, a HAVOK warhead detonated inside the geometrically angular Forerunner ship; its thirty-megaton yield amplified by the propulsive systems it was hooked up to. The blast looked as if it were a second sun had been born only thousands of kilometers above the surface of Arcadia.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1030 hours, December 7, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard Covenant battle cruiser, Procyon System, Arcadia. Four days after Forerunner ship destruction.

 

Alien yet familiar corridors freed from any Covenant forces that his imagination threatened to pop out at anytime filled Fred’s vision as he walked around. Though he knew that the ship was cleared of all Covenant forces, save the Engineers who were floating around, his rifle was still in his hands in a loose grip. Old habits died hard and he didn’t intend to break this particular habit.

They were stranded in space, just like the _Spirit of Fire_ , though at least they were near a formerly habitable planet which meant that there was some remote chance _someone_ would pick up their distress signal. He just hoped that it was the UNSC and not the Covenant. At least they had a few Covenant Engineers aboard to help with the repairs of the ship, but without raw materials, it seemed that the Engineers could not repair the parts which had been destroyed by both the ship-to-ship battle and the detonation of the HAVOK warhead.

The EMP wave had also knocked out most of their systems and the first thing they had immediately set the Engineers to fixing was life support and a distress beacon. Everything else had been a slow repair process so far. He had asked why the hijacked Forerunner ship had jumped to Arcadia and Captain Cutter had theorized that it could have been because Arcadia was the last Human port of call that the _Spirit of Fire_ had been in before they had chased down the Covenant to the shipyard shield world. Whatever that monstrous Flood form had been, it had managed to capture and corrupt the AI Serina, causing her to broadcast that message of defiance to the Covenant ship.

Between helping with the repairs to the Covenant ship as best as he could with his limited knowledge of the highly advanced technology and exploring the ship because there was nothing else to do, he had finally brought up the file which listed the Spartans and their status. He had been initially surprised to see over nine-hundred SPARTAN-III names that dwarfed the SPARTAN-II list, but it seemed that Kurt had merged the files together. He had reluctantly listed Alice as MIA again, and listed Mark as MIA, but hesitated when he thought about Chief Mendez.

That was where his feet were carrying him now, to the last location that he knew Lieutenant Hattersfield had occupied. The Chief was not a SPARTAN-II, but he thought that he deserved to be on the list of the missing-in-action, but then again, the Chief was also associated with ONI and he didn’t know what secrets those people kept. When he had seen the re-animated form his Spartans and the Chief in the depths of the ship before they had been teleported back to safety, he had felt a surge of indignant anger, but held his weapons in check. Judging from the threatening look that the spherical object that was conversing with the monstrosity, he was sure that the spherical thing had the same kind of beam weaponry as the Sentinels. Getting his commanding officer killed because he was livid at the way his people had been re-animated to horrors was not something he wanted to do.

As he passed by one of the many chambers filled with glowing nodes, he saw Jake and Dr. Mosely working near one of the nodes, surrounded by at least three Covenant Engineers, their ultrasonic chatters filling the air. One of them looked familiar to Fred, for it had distinct markings all along its bulbous, irregularly shaped gas sacks. That particular engineer had taking a liking to Jake and had followed the ONI Spartan around since they were stranded on the ship. Despite Jake’s attempts to get the Engineer to stop follow him; with a lot of jokes being cracked by Kelly because of it, the Engineer did not leave him alone. Despite the loss and the severity of their situation, Fred had also found Jake’s predicament slightly amusing, though he kept his thoughts and feelings to himself.

He passed a few more chambers and finally found Lieutenant Hattersfield sitting in a relatively empty one, examining several weapons that were lying on the ground. An Engineer hovered next to her with what looked to be a cross between a needler and pistol in its tentacles. The odd hybrid weapon was powered off, judging from the lack of pink glow from the needles. He stopped at the entrance and said, “Permission to enter, ma’am?”

“Granted,” Lieutenant Hattersfield said, looking up from where she was fiddling with a carbine before standing up.

As soon as he entered, the Engineer warbled and set the object it had in its down on the floor and floated towards him. It tried to maneuver behind him, but he spun and kept it facing him. Despite the docile, non-aggressive nature of the creature, it was still Covenant. It huffed in irritation and tried again, but he wouldn’t let it move behind it.

It gave a sudden squeal of protest as Lieutenant Hattersfield closed the distance and forcefully yanked the Engineer away, leveling the creature’s six-eyed face at hers, saying, “Leave him alone.” To Fred, she said, “I’m sorry about that. I thought it would be sufficiently occupied in creating hybrid weapons, but it looks like it is distracted by anything that’s remotely broken. We can’t have this particular one repairing your armor or else I’d have to shoot it.”

The Engineer gave a warble that sounded like a disappointing sigh before it picked up the needler-pistol hybrid and returned to its examination of it. The lieutenant gestured for him to sit as she sat and he complied. “So what’s the matter?” she asked.

“ONI Section Two directive has stated that all Spartans are to be listed as missing-in-action,” he began. “Permission to list Senior Chief Petty Officer Mendez on the list, ma’am.”

There was a heartbeat of silence before she flatly stated, “Denied.” But before he could say anything, she unhooked the datapad that was attached to her waist and handed it to him. He took it and activated, seeing an enormous list of names that he did not recognize. One of the lists had 492 names, while the list next to it had been sectioned off to ten and sixteen. He realized that he was looking at the Projects ORION and the SPARTAN-I.I participant list. Almost all the 492 names had K-I-A listed in the status section while eight of the first ten SPARTAN-I.I had K-I-A and the other sixteen had a status of ‘unknown’. He found Chief Mendez’s name in the ORION list and found the status of K-I-A next to his name.

“We’re not legends like you and the rest of the two-point-zeroes and three-point-zeroes,” Lieutenant Hattersfield said. “Your legacy is defined by the War, ours by shadows, experiments, and added casualties of the War. We don’t give hope to people. You and your team do, even those listed as missing-in-action, because people think that one day, Spartans will return in force to save them in their darkest hour.”

Fred shut the datapad down and returned it to the lieutenant. He thought that she was incorrect. Even if they were listed as KIA, the actions of those who had died aboard the Forerunner ship would live on in the hearts an inspiration. If they were miraculously saved by a ship that just happened by and both Jake and Lieutenant Hattersfield disappeared back into the depths of ONI, he and the other Spartans would never forget their actions either. “Understood,” he said, as he got up from the floor, following her actions. He gave her a crisp salute that she returned and he turned and left. At the entrance way, he hesitated for a second before turning back around and asked, “Permission to speak freely, ma’am?”

“Speak your mind, Fred,” she replied, nodding.

“I think you’re wrong,” he stated then fell silent. Had he overstepped his bounds by saying that? He didn’t know and could only hope that his words were heard by her. She didn’t say anything and he left.

 

* * *

 

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY \ Relative estimate: 1317 hours, December 7, 2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard Covenant battle cruiser, Procyon System, Arcadia. Four days after Forerunner ship destruction.

 

“What do we have, Hattersfield?” Captain Cutter asked as an insistent beep that had started moments ago kept blaring over and over.

The Engineer that had attached itself to Jake for the past four days detached itself and floated over to the other side of the engineering console and pressed a button to silence the beep. It floated back to where Jake was, but Leigh was cycling through the frequency bands as she heard crackling on some of the bands over COM. As best as the translational software on the laptop that was hooked up to the COM console on the ship, she keyed in several symbols and a repeated message broadcasted itself in her headset. It was on UNSC E-band.

“Sir, I think you should hear this. UNSC recognition code checks out,” she said, typing a few more symbols on the console and the message was broadcasted throughout the ship:

“This is UNSC _Tourniquet_ hailing Covenant vessel. I repeat, this is UNSC _Tourniquet_ hailing Covenant vessel. Do you need assistance? Is anyone alive?”

“Can you get a return signal established, Hattersfield?” Captain Cutter asked.

“Aye, sir,” she replied. “Give me a moment.”

“Fred, what kind of ship is she?” the captain asked the Spartan situated at another console.

“Unknown, sir. Scans indicate angular by nature with possible reflective coating or stealth systems that are throwing off the scanners. It’s most likely a Prowler,” he replied.

“COM established, sir,” Leigh spoke up.

“Put me through then,” Captain Cutter replied. As soon as she gave a nod to indicate that the Captain was linked, he said, “ _Tourniquet_ , this is Captain James Cutter, in command of this Covenant battle cruiser. We are in dire need of assistance. You just don’t know how much you made our day.”

“Captain Cutter? As in the commander of the _Spirit of Fire_?” the officer on the COM replied a bit incredulous. “Sir, I’m going to need your authorization code.”

The captain rattled off his sixteen digit code and the asked, “I have wounded here that need medical assistance and Spartans that need to get back into the War as soon as possible.”

There was a distinct pause on the COM before a scratching sound was heard as another deeply accented voice came on the system. “This is Captain Felicia Surenka, commander of the _Tourniquet_. Did I hear you correctly, Captain Cutter? You have Spartans on board?”

“Yes,” the captain replied, frowning a bit in puzzlement.

“Sir,” Captain Surenka said, “its twenty-five-seventy-three. The Human-Covenant War ended over twenty years ago.”

 

~*~*~*~


	11. Chapter 11

**Epilogue**

0800 hours, October 25, 2573 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard UNSC _Point of No Return_ , location classified.

 

Captain Cutter, Lieutenant Hattersfield, and Drs. Reinhart and Halsey were escorted to a particular catwalk in the depths of the ONI stealth-cruiser UNSC _Point of No Return_. The highly armed security personnel that had escorted them to this area left them standing in front of a curved white wall. As soon as it opened and one of the officers poked his head out, both the captain and lieutenant snapped to attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen please join us,” the officer, a Rear-Admiral Lower-Half by the one-star-one-bar on his shoulder tabs of his uniform, said, gesturing for them to enter.

They followed the officer, each feeling static crawl over their flesh as they crossed the threshold to a half-spherical room that had a pure black table in the center. It was slightly disorienting for Leigh to look at the illuminated walls and she focused her eyes on the table as the four of them approached it. She saw two other officers sitting at the table and both she and Captain Cutter froze. One had four stars on her shoulder tabs of her pristine UNSC Army-green uniform; the other had one-star-and-four-bars on his grey UNSC Navy uniform.

Both she and Captain Cutter snapped off salutes, with Captain Cutter addressing the officers, saying, “General, ma’am. Admiral, sir.”

The General swept her piercing gaze over the four of them before saying, “Have a seat. All of you.”

Leigh complied, sitting as straight as she could until her back hurt and stared straight ahead. When they had made contact with the _Tourniquet_ , and had found out that the War had been miraculously won over twenty years ago, she had forgotten to breathe for a few moments. Despite the odds, Humanity had survived…but how had they ended up loosing over twenty years?

“Captain Cutter, we’ll start with you first,” the Rear-Admiral began. “You and your crew have been listed as missing-in-action since twenty-five-thirty-one. Where the hell have you been?”

“Trying to get home sir,” Captain Cutter said. “We left Arcadia to chase down the Covenant that had captured Professor Anders. It led us to a Forerunner world where, inside there was a massive shipyard. It was a world-within-a-world. The Covenant had plans to use the ships against us in their campaign. We used our Slipspace drive core to overload the artificial sun in that world to destroy the place so that the Covenant could not get the ships. Since then, my crew and I have been trying to get back to UNSC-controlled space.”

“Indeed,” the General said, tapping something on the desk. “The only survivors of your crew are two Spartans and Professor Anders?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What happened to the _Spirit of Fire_?” the General asked.

“She was destroyed by Sentinels, ma’am,” Captain Cutter replied.

“Perhaps it would be best to hear both sides of the story,” the Admiral spoke up. “Doctor Reinhart, Lieutenant Hattersfield, and Doctor Halsey, how did you end up on the same ship as Captain Cutter and his surviving crew?”

The three of them looked at each other and Leigh was the one who started to speak. There was occasional input from either doctors on observations and actions she had not been witness to, and occasionally she turned to Captain Cutter for his part of the information once they had rescued the crew from the _Spirit of Fire_. All-in-all, the longer Leigh spoke, the more drained and tired she felt. It was not fatigue that plagued her, but the fact that she finally realized just how much they had all gone through in the past relative month aboard the ship. When she was finally done, both the General and the Rear-Admiral sat back, steeping their fingers in contemplation while the Admiral was stroking his chin.

“Unfortunately,” the Admiral began, “even with the end of the war, relationships between the colonies are still rocky at best. Tempers have flared, but we hadn’t had skirmishes break out yet. Our alliance with the Covenant, especially with the Sangheilli is somewhat tepid, due to what had been rendered on our colonies. Captain Cutter, we’re sorry for the deception, but during our discussion, we had to give you a polygraph test to determine if you were indeed telling the truth. Insurrectionists have been using your name and the name of your ship for a few years now, claiming that you’ve betrayed your service because their cause is justified.”

The captain remained silent and Leigh saw the understanding in his eyes. However, that silence was broken as the captain asked, “Sirs and ma’am, permission to be publicly court-martialed?”

“Granted, except for the fact that we have no way of explaining as to why you’re alive, Captain. You’re supposed to be almost a hundred years old by now…dead by all rights,” the Admiral said.

“We could say that we’ve found him and a few crew members drifting in cryo-pods,” the Rear-Admiral suggested.

“Leave my crew out of the court-martial, sir,” Captain Cutter spoke up. “Just me. If we give the rebels anymore fuel, then they may use it to further their campaigns.”

The Rear-Admiral frowned, clearly not used to being interrupted by a junior flag officer, but the Admiral nodded and said, “That may work. We shall discuss this further and see what options present themselves. In the meantime, Captain, you are dismissed. Due to the sensitive nature of what was exchanged, you are not to discuss anything that was spoken here to anyone else outside this room, even to me or the others if we happen to meet outside.”

“Yes, sir,” the captain replied, getting up and giving the three a crisp salute before departing.

Once the door to the strangely concave, half-sphere room closed again, did the general speak up, saying, “Section Zero and Section Three…I’d never thought I’d see the two most secretive sections of ONI ever work together, much less sit in the same room. My how the times have changed…and I’d never thought that the presumed dead would walk again.”

“Just how bad is the Insurrectionists situation, Admiral, General?” Dr. Halsey asked.

“Bad enough,” the Admiral replied, “if not worse than it was before the Covenant attacked us. Even though Reach had been glassed and almost all its information in the ONI databases destroyed, the Insurrectionists have managed to gather fragments of data. They’ve put together a lot of theories and though some of them are quite wild, there are a few that do hit too close to home, especially on the projects that are overseen by Section Zero and Section Three, especially Project ORION and the SPARTAN Projects. It’s a propaganda war, and we’re loosing.”

The Rear-Admiral tapped something on the desk in front of him and video feeds from various news sources popped up. They watched several clips in silence before the projection was fizzled away with another few taps by the Rear-Admiral.

“Operation BLACK WIDOW,” Leigh whispered, feeling her insides knot a bit from what she had heard play over the various feeds.

“Pardon?” the General asked.

“BLACK WIDOW was created in the event that someone managed to get classified information out or an AI had betrayed us and shipped the information to people who could use it to destroy the UNSC and-or ONI,” she explained. “It was conceived before the War and well after Project ORION. Its goal was to implicate those that were in charge of the Projects, thereby allowing those under their command to continue to support whatever they were doing without having to face the spotlight. The implication was for those in charge to put forth convincingly false data so that those who had access to the data could be found and eliminated, ma’am.”

“Interesting,” the Admiral said, stroking his chin again. “I have never heard of it.”

“Vice-Admirals Parangosky and Jackowitz knew and approved of it when it was presented,” she replied. “They were in charge of Three and Zero, respectively, sir. They were the officers also in charge of their respective Projects.”

“They passed away fifteen years ago, Lieutenant,” the Rear-Admiral spoke up. “Well before the Insurrectionists started their data hunt and propaganda warfare. Many of ONI’s secrets died with them.”

“Then respectfully, sirs and ma’am, I believe that we should still proceed with BLACK WIDOW,” she said.

“Then you’ve just implicated your fellow doctors here, Lieutenant Hattersfield,” the Admiral said. “The chain of command in ONI was mostly eliminated when Reach fell years ago. Technically, according to your explanation of BLACK WIDOW, that would make Doctor Reinhart in charge of ORION and Doctor Halsey in charge of SPARTAN-II. However, SPARTAN-II may possibly be spared from the propaganda carnage; due to many of the vocal support the colonies that also include many that have ties with Insurrectionists. However, SPARTAN-III’s chain of command was destroyed when Colonel Ackerson perished on Mars and Lieutenant Commander Ambrose perished on Onyx. The last officer that we know of that is in command of the SPARTAN-III Project, and is alive thanks to the miraculous return of your crew to UNSC space, is a Lieutenant Junior Grade Fred-one-zero-four.” In more of a whispered puzzled tone, he said, “A SPARTAN-II?”

“Sir,” Leigh said, shaking her head minutely, hoping that the officers would not take offense at what she was about to say, “If you implicate a SPARTAN-II in BLACK WIDOW, I believe that you’ll have a full-scale war on your hands in less than a year.”

“Justify yourself, Lieutenant,” the General said, raising an eyebrow.

“The information that Captain Surenka presented to us about the end of the War, along with your assessment of the SPARTAN-IIs with regards to BLACK WIDOW tells me that they are still considered legends. If you reveal that Spartans are still alive and at least one of them has committed the atrocities that the Insurrectionists are implying about the Projects…” she trailed off, unable to continue because of the knot in her stomach getting tighter as she knew what she had to do. “Sirs, ma’am, it is possible that document falsification and misinformation could be spread and the implication would fall on me.”

“Seeking martyrdom, Lieutenant?” the Admiral asked.

“No, sir,” she replied. “Just making sure that the Spartans get the small measure of peace that they deserve for their years of service to the UNSC.”

“I agree with your reasoning, Lieutenant,” the General said. “However, if we proceed with Operation BLACK WIDOW, then how will we explain the fact that those who have been declared dead are alive?”

“I suggest the first part of BLACK WIDOW: misinformation and the spread that these projects have still continued even after the War. It may not be the best to get the rebels riled up even more, but at least they’ll be more visible,” the Rear-Admiral suggested.

“Then Doctor Reinhart and Lieutenant Hattersfield, we will proceed with Operation BLACK WIDOW. Doctor Halsey, we will consider BLACK WIDOW for SPARTAN-II, but know that even you, may not be entirely protect now. The political climate’s an ever changing storm,” the Admiral said.

There was a very reluctant nod of assent from Dr. Reinhart, while Dr. Halsey frowned but remained silent for a moment before asking, “Admiral, perhaps we should send the Spartans to somewhere safe until this Operation is over?”

“We’ll send the Spartans to Earth, Doctor. It’s the safest haven we have.”

 

* * *

 

1100 hours, November 7, 2573 (Military Calendar) \ Earth. GPS unable to determine exact location due to thick debris field, estimated at southern hemisphere.

 

Sun, surf, and sand, all they could ask for in a granted shore leave that was long overdue for all of them, except none of them could fully enjoy it. Shock still lingered over all of them from a sudden battlefield and of a war that ended over twenty years ago. Despite the long odds, Humanity had survived and it was only through the alliance with the Elites that they lived to see the end of the war. Covenant presence was still not greatly tolerated, but peaceful avenues had been opened up between some of the races that comprised of the Covenant.

Still, where they had been dropped off at this place from some HIGHCOM Admiral’s request was more than they could ask for. It was so similar to Emerald Cove except some of its beauty was marred by the blackened landscape that was about fifty kilometers away. That glassed landscape would take more than a few decades to recover, if at all, and though the Spartans could chance a swim across the rough, shark-infested waters to the mainland of Australia, they did not.

A week-and-a-half had passed since they had landed on Earth, nearly three weeks since their final ordeal aboard the Flood-controlled Forerunner ship. They had been sequestered away to Earth, separated from the rest of the surviving crew and scientists. They had been taken to small memorials that had been erected over the past two decades, to let them see and hear testimonials from those retired veterans who had fought beside Master Chief during the last harrowing weeks of the Human-Covenant war.

They had been forbidden to wear their MJOLNIR armors or SPI armors and had them taken away, though they had been reassured that their armors were sitting in a safe and secured location. They had also not been allowed to speak with anyone save for themselves and though they could have broken through their ‘captors’ with ease, they dared not to. It was only because they knew that wherever the UNSC had taken Dr. Halsey, Dr. Reinhart, Dr. Mosely, Professor Anders, Captain Cutter, and Lieutenant Hattersfield, things would not bode well for those who were not with them.

As soon as they had been dropped off on this island, the surviving SPARTAN-IIIs had created their own memorial to those they lost in their effort to get home, and those who had fought bravely in the last vestiges of the war they had missed. However, they had also been paid a surprise visit by of all people, Maria-062, the only SPARTAN-II on record to have retired. Even more surprising was the fact that after all this secrecy by the people who had brought them here, she brought her whole family with her. That had stunned them the most.

She had retired and started a family outside the close-knit Spartan ‘family’. A foreign concept if there was ever one that the Spartans truly never understood the best. However, the Gamma Company Spartans were still just young enough to slightly remember what a real family was and why exactly they had volunteered to be trained and augmented for all those grueling years. They had retreated into the small house that was on the island and hadn’t emerged until nightfall.

Maria became the doting mother, completely changed from the way she had been during the war, surprising a few, as her husband, children, and grandchildren, all enlisted in the various UNSC corps told them stories of the years they had been missing. Jerome and Douglas listened with rapt attention as the other Spartans told what had happened in the years after 2531, while Maria, her husband, and her children told the rest what had happened during the last months of the war and the missing twenty years. Even Jake had shared a few of the missions he had done during his time in ONI Section Zero, encountering the still-missing-and-now-presumed-deceased Grey Team in one of them.

Sun, surf, sand, and a long overdue shore leave was given to them, but it was shattered with the arrival of a chopper bearing not the standard markings of the UNSC Army choppers, but of ONI. No one had been expecting it; even Maria was on guard as the chopper landed and a person ran out from under the rotors, carrying something in his hands. Maria was the first to approach the ONI agent and then waved all of them over.

The agent was a youngster, most likely an early graduate of college with top scores. When they had gathered, the ONI agent shouted over the noise of the rotors, “I was ordered to give you this. I was also ordered to warn you that if you attempt to try to leave this island without UNSC forces picking you up, the consequences would be grave. I don’t know who the hell you all are, but should you also try to hijack the chopper, we will blow it up.”

None of them attempted to stop the agent or move towards the chopper. The young man had no experience of the war and all files on the Spartans were either destroyed when Reach had been partially glassed over twenty years ago or when Onyx was destroyed. He didn’t know who they were.

When the noise of the chopper faded away and they were left alone again on the sandy beach, Jake, who had received the package, opened it and flicked the small solar-powered television on. What flickered over him was instead a deep retinal scan that had him seeing spots and a small needle that pricked the tip of his finger and withdrew the blood sample back into its housing case.

It took a minute for the television to power up, but as the static hissed and resolved to a news channel, they all watched in rapt silence at the events that were unfolding before their eyes.

“This is Liberty Vassar reporting for Colonial News Network, bringing you the fifth day of the proceedings. We expect closing statements from both sides today and then the judges will deliberate for the maximum two hours given for this type of joint military-civilian trial. Again, this is one of the most unusual trials ever held and only the third of its kind in the past six hundred years since the United Nations was formed,” the woman resolved in the slightly static picture said.

“If you recall earlier, we’ve mentioned that there are actually two trials taking place at the recently-rebuilt UNSC High Command center on Reach. One is for Captain James Cutter, who was presumed ‘lost with all hands’ back in twenty-five-thirty-four. Speculations on his and his crew’s defections to the Insurgents still run strong and Cerberus’s Gauntlet has already claimed that the captain defected because of the group’s just cause. The UNSC has confirmed that there are no survivors from the _Spirit of Fire_ other than Captain Cutter. How the UNSC found him still remains a question and our calls have not been returned, though it is speculated that he was found floating in a cryo-pod in the depths of space.

“Our second coverage is the more widely known case that was unearthed by you, the people who vote for our colonial governments, during the months after the chaotic end of the Great War. Questionable ethics and the draconian ways of the UNSC have come under more scrutiny in the past years since the end of the War. Files uncovered by you the viewers and through other confirmed official sources have produced enough evidence to accuse the both the UNSC and the Office of Naval Intelligence of extreme neglect with regard to the Human race. Unethical behavior, the kidnapping of children, and the questionable practices of the Office of Naval Intelligence, known to many as ONI, with direction through the UNSC has rocked the foundation of the UN’s military might and forces.

“To bring viewers who have not been following us until now up to speed, we start with the uncovered Project ORION. Headed by Doctor Anton Reinhart who has been in cryo on-and-off for many years and has pee-aitch-dees in bio-chemistry, psychology, genetics, and neuroscience, this was launched to counter the growing insurgent attacks in the colonies. The project used advance indoctrination and biological augmentation techniques on common soldiers. Note that these ‘volunteers’ were conscripted out of our forces and their augmentations resulted in only ten percent surviving to return to active duty. These soldiers were integrated back into our military forces but suffered from mental and physical degradation. No help was given to them. There are rumors that even those who survived, if they managed to have children, their children were also ‘recruited’ into Project ORION.

“Enter Doctor Catherine Elizabeth Halsey, progenitor of the SPARTAN-II Project. She has also been revealed to be in cryo almost just as long as Doctor Reinhart. We have been fielding many calls from veterans these past few days regarding the SPARTAN-IIs and while we do appreciate the varying opinions, but the facts remain as they are. What you many not know is that Doctor Halsey was a student of Doctor Reinhart, thereby giving us an educated guess as to how the SPARTAN-II project started…from the ashes of Project ORION. To remind our viewers, Doctor Halsey kidnapped seventy-five children from our colonies to serve in her experiments and there are unconfirmed rumors that she replaced those seventy-five with complete flash-clones.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to recover the names of the seventy-five children kidnapped or of the names of those forcefully conscripted into the precursor project. Heroic as the SPARTAN-IIs may be, only a handful survived when the same biological augmentations given to those from ORION were given to these children. However, what you viewers may not know is that the creation of these SPARTAN-IIs was not originally to fight the Covenant, but to brutally put down the leaders of those who were striving to reach the dream of the confederation of independent colonies. Among those initially assassinated by the SPARTAN-II was the beloved UNSC Marine Colonel Robert Watts. They kept assassinating colonies’ leaders, effectively killing all possible avenues of negotiations for peace. Though we may say that we’re grateful that we had Spartans to help us in the War, do not forget, viewers, that they were first and foremost, created as the UNSC’s weapon to take over our freedoms.

“Our freedoms were sacrificed when the Covenant attacked our colonies and we fled, but even when we fled, the UNSC was still pushing for total martial law on us. Those viewers who have survived the Great War know that there were not enough Spartans out in the field to even stop all the attacks. However, what you may not know is that there were more children conscripted into the UNSC, though not used in the way that most people would think of. No, viewers, these children, over nine-hundred of them in a twenty-year period, were thrown to the Covenant on suicide missions. Given the code-name of SPARTAN-IIIs, these young children were indoctrinated to needlessly throw their lives away against the Covenant forces. They did not buy us time to flee, they brought the full fury of the Covenant down upon us.

“Head of this covert operation was not Doctor Halsey herself, but rather, the traitorous UNSC Army Colonel James Ackerson, working for ONI, who decided that Doctor Halsey had not sacrificed enough children. Unfortunately, Colonel Ackerson and all but one of his command staff for the SPARTAN-III Project were killed during the last months of the War. UNSC Navy Lieutenant Leigh Hattersfield stands today, with her fellow cohorts, on this last day of statements before deliberations, as the one responsible for the needless sacrifice of nine-hundred children. However, we have heard many rumors that Lieutenant Hattersfield may have also been involved in both Project ORION and the SPARTAN-II Project and that these Projects have been continuing on since the end of the Great War. Rumors has they may be, we ask that you, the views be extra vigilant. Remember, Colonial News Network brings you only the straight facts.

“As such, we bring you, viewers back to the courtroom where we have the traditional military court for Captain Cutter, and a joint civilian-military court for the ONI case. The three admirals that will render judgment on Captain Cutter are Lord Admiral Terrance Hood, Rear-Admiral Susanna Parenshka, and Vice-Admiral Yuri Olegov. The joint board for the ONI case will be tended by the Honorable Judith M’rek, the Honorable Winston Durfee, the Honorable Lu-xiag Peng, Vice-Admiral Laura Morimoto, General Benyamin Ital, and Admiral Patrick Creighton.

“Due to the sensitive nature of Captain Cutter’s trial, no cameras have been allowed and we’ve just received word that final statements have been said a half-hour ago and the decision has been made. Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Cutter has not been found guilty of his charges and dismissed from UNSC service. We are now hearing that evidence presented against his case have been found to be false and planted by terrorists. We will take calls from our viewers as soon as the second case gives their final statements and the judges go into deliberation. For now, comments will be taken on our social networking site.

“Ah, the defendants in the ONI case are entering the court room now. In a few minutes, we should have the judges enter…and there they are. Let us listen in for the final statements… With the two-hour deliberation clock ticking, we will now take your calls and comments…”

The image of the wispy-looking journalist faded away and was replaced by a slightly fuzzy image of Admiral Hood, causing all of them to almost snap to attention despite the simmering anger that most of them felt, until they realized that what they had seen was not live, but a recorded playback. Admiral Hood started speaking, saying, “It had to be done Spartans. There was no way to avoid it or else we risked open civil war. Over twenty years since the War’s end and even though most of the files were destroyed when they glassed Reach, Insurrectionists still managed to hack our networks and recover artifacts…enough of them to start putting theoretical pieces together. We had to give them something, to placate them without the use of force as we had been doing prior to the War, to show that we’re not what many of the media outlets call us…’Draconian’.

“We had anticipated something like this during the War on the off chance that Humanity did survive, and in response to the requests from HIGHCOM, Lieutenant Hattersfield created Operation BLACK WIDOW. The goal was to only implicate the leaders of all three programs, thereby allowing those in the programs continued anonymity and functionality. Had Admirals Parangosky and Jackowitz not passed away years ago, then they would have taken responsibility for all three projects.

“Vice-Admiral Morimoto and Admiral Creighton both abstained from voting, as did the Honorable Durfee. As per BLACK WIDOW, Doctor Reinhart was found guilty of all his charges and sentenced to life in prison. Doctor Halsey was cleared of her charges due to her enormous contribution both before and during the War, but has been barred from all research and developmental institutions. Lieutenant Hattersfield was found guilty of all her charges and was dismissed from UNSC service.

“It had to be done. Spartans, transport will arrive in two days and bring you to Reach. There you will pick up your armors and will rendezvous with the UNSC _Ember of Winter_ , commanded by Captain Cutter.

“We had hoped that Operation BLACK WIDOW would have put the flames of rebellion and civil war out. Unfortunately, an hour after the court adjourned, extremists got through security and shot and killed several civilians and military personnel before they were killed. Among the dead are Reinhart and Hattersfield. As of this message, Doctor Halsey is still critically wounded with possible permanent brain damage. We were united during the War, but grievances have started to take root again. Addressing these issues will take time.

“What happened over Arcadia has shown us that had it not been Humans aboard the ship and was purely Flood-controlled, then we would had have bigger problems to deal with. There are indications pointing to this potential problem; the Onyx Sentinels are not all deactivated or destroyed, as evidenced by a Covenant ship sent about three days ago that was lost upon Slipspace exit. If there are more of these Shield Worlds, then there may be more proof that the Flood are starting to rebuild and we have to protect our people, even if they themselves shoot at us.

“Your legacy is what gives people hope. If the analysis is correct, we’re going to need every Spartan we have; not for civil war, but against the Flood.”

 

~*~*~*~

 

FINI


End file.
